#Specifically Smith getting to meet Renee and Allison for the first time

[jtl-fics]

Fluent Freshman - Part 43

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FF is a pretty good student. Solid Bs in his Gen-eds and As in regard to his major. With one C+ that he’s still working on with Captain Neil but it’s higher than the D+ that he had been pulling before Captain Neil had started to tutor him and he really just needs to pass the one gen-ed required math class.

There was many a deep breathing exercise before he made an appointment with his educational advisor for the next semester back in October but it hadn’t been that bad even though she was the one that had asked if he knew anyone good at math since it obviously was not a strong suit of his. So he dragged his grade up from a D+ to a C+ and he was pretty proud of that.

FF has a preferred spot in each and every one of his classrooms. In his Gen-Ed courses he sits in spots that the Professors don’t even notice and where there is almost always a gap between him and the next person. He arrives perfectly almost late every single day for every single class he can to achieve this feat.

For his Major classes he sits near the front with the few Foreign Language major friends that he has.

FF likes to be prepared. Studying was a nice way to prepare for the future. If he’s already read the entire textbook front to back and taken notes then a pop quiz can’t catch him off guard. He double, triple, and quadruple checks homework. He could probably recite the syllabus for any of his classes off the top of his head. He has read it so much to make sure he’s gotten everything and is on track.

FF kind of likes finals week.

For once, for one week, everyone is as anxious as him.

He sits next to Nicky patting his back as his friend sobs into a pillow. “I’m not going to graduate and it’s going to delay seeing Erik by an entire year!” Nicky yells as he brings his face out of the pillow.

“Nicky, you only got one flashcard wrong how about you shut the fuck up!” Aaron yells from his desk where he seems to have spontaneously developed ambidextrousness as he writes notes with both hands. “Fuck I am NEVER fitting all of this one one index card.” Aaron slams his face into the table.

“I don’t even need this degree.” Matt says looking down at a textbook that he has not turned a page on for the last hour. The fact that Matt had also not even opened that textbook before now was a bit of a cause for concern. “I’ve already got offers for professional teams. I can just play Exy. I do not need to pass a workplace psychology course.” Matt says.

“You think Dan wants an idiot?!” Nicky demands not wanting to go down alone.

“She thinks it’s cute that I’m stupid!” Matt exclaims.

“No she doesn’t!” Aaron points at him, “She said and I quote ‘I love it when you use that big ol sexy brain of yours.’ the last time you had her on speaker phone!” he uses a slightly more…effeminate voice when he impersonates Dan but FF had spoken with Dan and to his memory she did not sound like that.

“Fuck you’re right she deserves an all rounder!” Matt cries, head in his hands.

“Why do I even have to TAKE this Gen-Ed about history?” Nicky demands now holding onto FF as if he were a teddy bear.

“So that we’re well-rounded individuals with a wider perspective on-”

“Smithy, my sweet child, I was not looking for an answer.” he feels Nicky’s hand come up to his hair and maybe he’s being treated more like a favored pet?

“You’re having trouble with a Gen-Ed?!” Aaron asks turning around in his seat, “That’s embarrassing.” he turns his nose up.

“I’m having trouble with something that is going to be useless in my adult life.” Nicky says as if he were not currently an adult. “You are having issues with a class that will have huge ramifications on your future if you don’t manage to learn it!” Nicky points out.

“Eat my shorts Nicky.” Aaron hisses.

“Maybe I could study if you would wash your shorts Aaron. I can smell your laundry pile from over here!” Matt spits.

The fight devolved from there and FF slipped out of the dorm as Nicky was holding a chair over his head to seemingly throw at Matt for his ‘unreasonable number of sticky notes messing up the flow of Nicky’s studying’.

He heard a crash.

“It’s probably fine.” he says to himself and he has his index cards with the speech he has to give for and he really should go over to talk with Captain Neil.

He walks to Captain Neil, Andrew, and Kevin’s door and- “There faster-!”

FF walks away from Captain Neil, Andrew, and Kevin’s door, remembering only in this moment that Kevin had declared that he would be “Living in the library until this paper is done or I am.” to the team at the last practice of the year.

Captain Neil and Andrew were never the type to waste an empty dorm room.

He misses Pepto Bismol as he hears a particularly dirty line of Russian coming from his Captain’s dorm room.

***

Eventually Finals week is done and dusted with only 4-5 more blow-ups in his dorm room that result in Nicky, Aaron, and Matt stopping their fight to see if they accidentally had knocked him out with all of the thrown debris (only happened once when Aaron threw a textbook that Nicky ducked but he didn’t.)

FF came out of his final…final feeling pretty good all around. He had managed to get some extra tutoring time with Captain Neil after Kevin managed to finish his history paper a little early. Despite all of their fears and complaints Aaron, Nicky, and Matt all did manage to pass all of their finals and their classes.

The Tower was closing tomorrow for the rest of the year and despite checking almost every day with Nicky he still was invited to go to New York City with most of the team to stay at Allison’s house.

“Smithy, did you pack a swimsuit?” Nicky asks.

“Nicky, we’re going to New York for Christmas break. Do you think we’re going to swim?” Aaron asks incredulously.

“Two words, my fetus of a cousin: Hot. Tub.” Nicky holds his hand up and putting one finger up and then another. “Is hot tub two words?” Matt asks as he reaches for his own swim trunks.

“Yes Matt hot tub is two words.” FF says nodding.

“Thank you Smithster.” Matt says.

“I can’t believe you don’t know that hot tub is two words.” Aaron says with a huff.

“I can’t believe that you don’t know how to not be an asshole even after you started getting regular sex with Katelyn.” Matt returns, “Look at how not a thing that was when Smithster answered it.” he gestures to FF.

“You cannot compare Smithy to Aaron. Apples and Tomatoes.” Nicky dismisses.

“Whatever, so Allison got a hot tub at her place?” Aaron moves past the conversation.

“Aaron you just made fun of Matt for asking stupid questions.” Nicky says with a hand on his cheek.

“I fucking hate being part of your family.” Aaron says without any real heat.

“Yeah sure.” Nicky says, rolling his eyes and smiling as he saw Aaron packing swim trunks that FF knew he had bought for his cousin.

“Okay, I’ve got the packing list that Allison sent. Do we wanna run through it so that we’re all properly packed?” Matt says holding up his phone.

“Yeah, let’s run through it.” Nicky says with a sigh.

They went through Allison’s provided list twice and then zipped up their suitcases. Smith was going to be driving to the airport with Matt. Neil and Andrew were going to be driving the Maserati up alone while the rest of them were going to be flying up to New York City.

Now onto something that filled FF with far more dread than simply passing tests that determined whether or not he continued to get a free ride in college.

Meeting new people.

MASTERPOST FOR ALL PARTS OF FLUENT FRESHMAN AU

#Fluent Freshman AU #Just as a note I'm probably going to be taking November off #I should be getting the keys to the Condo on Halloween #and there's just so much to do with it #So I'll be doing a smaller WW #and taking the month off for FF #But I'll come back with some fun I've been planning for ages #Specifically Smith getting to meet Renee and Allison for the first time #And really getting to know Dan #There may be a few special guests but I haven't decided yet #Andrew and Neil absolutely take an extra day to get up to New York for 'absolutely no reason' #but the reason was that they pulled off to a quiet pit stop and made out for so long that it was just irresponsible for them #to not go to a motel #As for where we left off with the Winter Banquet #It was just Smith waiting around until the bus came back #He just ignored that old dude looking for him #and walked to the bus without breaking stride #Who knows who said that Smith was there #I do #FF - 42 #AFTG AU #AFTG OC #Andreil #Nicky Hemmick #Kevin Day #Aaron Minyard #Matt Boyd

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 87

I had these two Uncut magazine subscriptions that had interviews with Ray Davies in them about four years apart, and I often times enjoyed looking through them over and over, and reading the articles, sifting through and memorizing each and every interesting detail I could find, every personal story about The Kinks that I could find. Ray and Dave had an older sister named Renee who had died. In and of itself it held little significance that I shared the name of their beloved older sister, and yet it still meant something to me for some reason. I always wanted to cut the pictures out of my dearly beloved magazines, but wouldn't let myself do it. The Kinks had come to Lewiston Idaho of all places at the bitter end of their career. I had scowered through all their tour dates from that year, and as far as I could see, Lewiston Idaho of all places might have been when the Davies brothers had finally had enough of each other – growing so tired of seeing each other that they split up what was left of The Kinks forever to go solo, to silently go about the business of insulting one another to the media in subtle ways – mostly Dave Davies. When I had found out about The Kinks having played a show in Lewiston, I had my father talk to someone who had worked on their lights in town, an they said that Ray and Dave had been livid and furious at one another. It all seemed so weird to me, but I imagine that some if not all of this was extremely idealistic sign seeking. I mean, what could any of it all really mean. It was a personal coincidence to me alone. To the rest of the world, it was just where it happened to end.

I ended up cutting my hair as Ray Davies had his hair back in the late 60's, with the short bangs and the layered short hair. It was kind of a strange short lived English hair style for men in that very specific time in music. It didn't look the same on me. I knew what I was doing. I had looked at his hair for hours in the pictures I had of him, and when I came out having cut my hair precisely as his hair had been, I pretended that I had done it on accident because I didn't want everyone thinking I was a lunatic. And I was, but I kind of wasn't. Unlike Eugene, I had no interest in hooking up with Ray Davies at all as he was/is old enough to be my grandfather and he had been too old for the me in 2011 back in 1978 – unless I could get a time machine and even then I was fairly certain that we weren't compatible, and my affections for Ray Davies didn't really sway me in the direction of wanting to be physically near him or to even talk to him even though I thought he was absolutely beautiful. It's like I wanted to be him, but I wasn't trying to actually be him. I just wanted to be a little bit like him, or maybe I felt like I was a little bit like him, or I identified with something about him only found him to be a master at expressing that something in a way I was not. The specifics on that were blurry.

In order to improve my social skills, I read through the famous book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. I read it three times, as the book suggests. I read it despite and because of the chaos that ensued all around me. It was extremely helpful and insightful. It as basic as all get out, but it wasn't wrong about people either. I needed all the help I could get and the information in the book was precisely the kind of stuff I needed to be hearing. I wasn't good at peopling. This people business of making things happen in the world didn't come naturally. I was going to have to work for every morsel of people skills I had. Absolutely nothing came naturally to me. Even saying hi was an enormous question mark in my head.

My mother had started to save the money she made to move out. She had three thousand dollars. One day, we went out for groceries, came back and the three thousand was gone. Roxanne had bust in and stolen it. For the first week and a half after Roxanne had gotten out of her month of time in rehab, she had been enthusiastic, clear minded and ready for a life of sobriety. She was in rainbow land. And then it all came crashing down and she was back to using and every bit as desperate as ever. She came in one day, and I laughed and punched her arm lightly and affectionately, and she had suddenly become hostile. She threatened to throw me to the ground and beat me to a bloody pulp. It was sudden, and I was alarmed. And I knew she was back to using again. She went over to our mom and started telling her how she was going to lay 'that bitch' out – me. My mom looked at her nervously and attempted to explain that it had been a good natured sort of touch, not an attempt at a fist fight, but Roxanne seemed to not comprehend the gesture as being anything less than hostile. And soon enough we had to tell her to leave.

That three thousand dollars was not the first either. Sagen came in and stole the next sixteen hundred my mom saved up three weeks later. It was like the two of them were watching our house. They knew how to get in and out of Wes's. The look on my mom's face was horrifyingly sad when she looked around and suddenly realized that all the money she had been working for was gone. I often times lacked sympathy for much of my mother's outbursts, but this was a sincere and horrifying sadness. She actually began wailing. It felt like nothing was going right for anyone. Between Roxanne and Sagen my mother had essentially lost two months worth of wages. It was all in their arm probably before we even knew the money wasn't there anymore. If we hadn't had food stamps we would have been starving. Later on, Roxanne or Sagen or both, came in and also stole some rare collectors coins that Wes had owned. My mother never told Wes as he never looked at his coin collection – but it had been well over another five hundred lost and we all knew why.

At one point I remember the sink stopped working, and so we had to do the dishes in the handicap shower. It was very difficult. Allison attempted in vain to make friends. The people who she attracted were strange and nothing seemed to stick. She met these twin girls one day who were around her age that lived in our area. Both of them were very friendly, but not particularly bright. Allison remembers going to their house and watching them play with Barbies. Allison didn't play with toys anymore so she just watched and was amiable. What was strange about these girls is that they were very childlike, and also very unabashedly trying to get pregnant and make babies, which they both succeeded in soon enough so I guess good on them? And yet they still played with toys.

At night, Allison, David and I would walk around. We generally slept till the afternoon, or whenever my mother was awake. We hoped to avoid her as much as possible, and on the rare occasion where she had put down her farmville to get some rest, we were all very grateful. We listened to a lot of The Smiths and Joy Division. Properly speaking, we three aren't true goths, but to Lewiston we probably were. And admittedly, David and I in particular do have some level of that aesthetic ingrained in our nature. If I were to go cheap internet quiz on the matter – I would say I was 25% goth, but if post punk is the general term being used superficially we were both 40%. I also liked to think of myself as some kind of Lo-fi subcategory of indie that was folk-punky that encompassed mostly musicians I felt like I could relate to like Kimya Dawson or Jeffrey Lewis (a beloved favorite of mine). And at the same time I sometimes liked to imagine that if 60's baroque pop was a musical movement that had more of a distinct cult following like goth in the eighties, I was a good deal of  whatever that as well.

Anyway, in Lewiston I guess we weren't the biggest goths the world had ever seen since there was a rumor going around that there were teenagers pretending to or believing they were vampires who were biting people who walked alone at night. It seemed intriguing so we all went out every night hoping to meet the vampires. For all we knew though, that rumor could have been about us taking our nightly walks, we would never know. We decided to playfully defend our position by pretending that we were a group of The Cramps inspired psychobilly freaks called The Heebie Jeebies. I knew there was something called that already but I never bothered or felt curious enough to discover what that something was. Basically, we were these untouchable psychotic psychobilly freaks who drove around in old punked out hearses, played insane violent car games, messing up anyone who got in our way at night. We stayed up all night and slept all day. We were a gang and there were others. We invented characters. I felt influenced by some of the crazier tunes I had heard of Screamin' Jay Hawkins as well as Reverend Horton Heat and offbeat 60's horror. I liked the demented obscurity of it. We liked to make jokes that we were going to find those vampire kids and mangle them. It was a great way to pass the time as we walked for two hours through Lewiston at night.

One night around one in the morning. David was angry about something, and had just begun to drift. Allison was almost asleep as well. I was still awake, capturing a rare moment for myself in which everyone in the house was more or less asleep – a time at which I have always felt the most safe – when I started hearing the sound of pouring liquid. It sounded incredibly loud in the house. I looked over at a small closet where Allison and I kept most of our belongings and it was now heavily pelting on everything. It smelled terrible. Confused, I woke my mother up. She shouted at me, but I led her to the closet area anyway, and showed her the smelly liquid raining down on everything Allison owned and some things I owned as well. It was coming from the upstairs. My mother immediately got a ghostly disgusted look. Wes apparently had a giant container that held several gallons of urine. It was something that prevented him from having to attempt to get on his toilet which was hard for him. In his sleep he had knocked the container over, and what was raining on our stuff was his days old urine.

My mom was angry at first, and went and cleaned up the mess from the upstairs immediately. Allison had awoken to see that most of her posters and a great deal of her possessions were soaked and beyond repair. On top of everything else my sister had to go through, being kicked out for essentially no reason and so forth, seeing a lot of her stuff destroyed was rather disheartening. I lost a good deal of my paper items as well. I had to throw away some wood furniture. But I kept most of my books where I slept in my coffin so my losses weren't as great. My mother told us she would clean up the mess – since I guess his urine had some kind of disease in it – but after a few days it was clear she was simply refusing to do it.  I didn't think Allison, after having lost all of that stuff, should have had to have cleaned it all up by herself, but that is what ended up happening. We weren't exactly mad at Wes. It had been due to his laziness that this had happened, but I could only imagine how embarrassed and gross he felt upstairs. After that night, I grew suspicious and worried about urine rain coming down on me in the night. I tried to cover everything up better.

Sometimes I was beginning to feel like I couldn't take it anymore. I would never get out of this mess. I would never leave. My attempts at self improvement at the end of the day only amounted to me feeling that much more dissatisfied than I would have been had I not tried making the most of myself. I wondered about the darker avenues one could take to leave their family. Sell myself as a slave? Obviously, it was an unappealing thought – not one that I was going to follow through with – but what was it going to fucking take? Sarah-Mae was equally worried. She felt like there should be some kind of law against the way we were living. She talked to her mother about it, and they both were strongly pressuring me to call social services on my mom. I didn't feel quite right about it. While she had been a miserable person to be around, was what she was doing actually illegal? And I already knew it wasn't going to work. Interestingly, Wes was best friends with one of the number one people you talk to concerning social services. It was one of his few friends who seemed to honestly like and care about Wes. And while Sarah was trying to convince me to turn my mom in, she was up there serving this very fellow. He was in our house at that moment. There was no way it would have worked. And I remember feeling this vacant frustration with Sarah's methods of doing things. Ninety percent of the time, she took a very reasonable and pragmatic approach to solving problems. These approaches often times assumed there were no stipulations or psychological costs to the next step. In a lot of ways, it was good for me to listen to her, even when it went against my nature because I knew full and well that I could be my own worst enemy in regards to how I approached my life.

But every once in awhile, Sarah would, with the very best of intentions offer an explanation, a solution, or an assumption that felt redundant and sort of senseless. I wasn't mad at her for this. While it's true, she helped me talk through and work through a lot of my technical issues in life and she was right, I also knew that she wasn't god and couldn't fix my life. I think the disconnect was happening because she couldn't quite balance out being a friend who suffered with me, and being a friend who disconnected from my issues to help me remotely. In order to help me out in a remote sense, she couldn't let herself stand in my shoes. And at times I felt very alone, and misunderstood. Sometimes all I needed was the sense that I wasn't alone. And sometimes in order to solve a deeper seated issue, I felt like for instance with calling social services, it felt like she wasn't reading the situation clearly. Because even when I explained to her that the social service top guy was actually having supper upstairs, she almost had this remote sense that I should call him anyway, even though he knew us all by name already. I tried to explain that it didn't make sense, and she gave me this answer of 'well, you never know unless you try'. Allison, David and all knew that trying would be a bad idea, so that was never tried.

David was getting pretty terrible again. The stressful living situation was getting to him – bringing out his mental instability. I tried everything in my power not to fight with him, but he would emotionally attack us all. His fights with my mother got so bad – involving him going and breaking Wes's things and threatening to do worse, that she ended up calling the police on him. He was yelling and the entire scene was horrifying. Allison and I were afraid to leave the house. We sat on our beds fearfully and quietly crying. When the police officer came to the house, David was frenzically pacing around. If we so much as looked at him he would come up to us like he was going to hurt us. I remember the officer walking down the dingy little steps into the basement. David had retired to his bed area. It seemed strange to see a police officer in the basement, he was very out of place.

He started talking to David, telling him what happens to kids like him who refuse to go to school, who are violent and aggressive. For the most part he was telling David a specific kind of truth, but I felt there was an insensitive assholish aspect to this officer. What he essentially was telling us was 'adults are always right, your parents are always right, the world is a fair place and our misfortunes were brought upon us by ourselves'. David in many respects was at times someone who I had emotional difficulty feeling openly warm towards. I loved him to death, but you couldn't let yourself get hurt and you always knew that in the end he would hurt you and himself. But it seemed unjust to me to simply think that David was obstinately choosing this for himself, like he had ordered his emotional state out of a magazine arbitrarily as some kind of meddlesome fun. It was clear that he was miserable and looking at David like he was no victim seemed empty and rude. It was that same kind of attitude that had always prevented me from wanting to seek out help when I had needed it. If you live in a home and society that feels you deserve the bad things that are happening to you, then you internalize those bad things and it's sometimes easier for you to become cognitively dissonant and accept it.

I was relieved that the cop was there, as for the moment it had at least shut David down. I can't say I liked this cop much. He then started looking around the room and telling David how lucky all three of us were to live in this tiny room. Even my mother, who prided herself as some kind of tireless martyr was confused. While it was true that we had a fair amount of movies, books, stacks of albums and posters and pictures all over our wall, the idea that we were living well was a joke. I was personally offended. How could you look at Allison's stained pad on the floor, with no sheet and think of her as lucky? Would he seriously subject his children to this disaster? Or himself? I thought not. It seemed like an additional slap to face for all of us.

Sarah was having personal issues at home. I look back and I think some of her fixation on helping me might have been due to the strain of not knowing how to end her relationship. She didn't ever seem to look forward to going home. She seemed almost like Alex's mother sometimes. They didn't talk all that much either. They still seemed connected but there didn't seem to be a lot there. And Sarah didn't talk about him all that much. Neither one of them were the types to explode or fight out loud. What happened instead between them was almost an unspoken truce of resentment and indifference that translated into an empty form of polite acceptance of one another, that to me seemed almost worse than fighting. But maybe it was just that bad. There was so little passion between them, their relationship was so much like stale soda at this point that even fighting would have meant more than they shared. Or maybe they had simply both betrayed one another. Not in any theatrical display of abandonment or betrayal, but they had given up on their relationship but didn't want to talk about it, and so they continued to live with one another, both too proud and uncertain of their futures to know what else to do. I couldn't help but feel in retrospect, that they would be better off cheating on one another. It would have been more honest at least.

Then Sarah started telling me stuff. She had found three bottles of cough syrup in the back of the pick up that they had been given to drive from her mother. Alex had famously abused cough syrup when Sarah first knew him, but he had by all accounts quit for her. Now with this discovery that he had chugged three bottles of syrup, new questions sprang up. At first Alex denied that the bottles were his or that he had anything to do with it, but then he accepted that he was caught and told her it had just been that one time – no harm no foul. Sarah was embarrassed to tell me about it all – but she finally relented and let me know. She seemed disappointed. She was afraid I would see her relationship as a failure. She was afraid of the idea that her years spent with Alex had been a mistake. She didn't know what to do with him, but she felt weak without him.

And then soon after, she opened her piggy bank by her desk and found forty dollars missing. She was very upset about that. They quarreled. Alex felt that Sarah was obsessed with money. Sarah made it seem like money in her approach to the situation, but I knew Sarah, and the truth of the matter was she felt disrespected and she didn't trust Alex. Being mad at Alex at this point gave her an avenue to channel her distaste for being with him. She wasn't attracted to him. She didn't even seem to care if they spent any time with one another. She clearly was over him, but neither one felt like they could end it. So a fight about this stolen forty dollars was the first push towards the end.

I remember talking to Sarah about it outside of my mother's house. She drove out to Lewiston and we went out to a restaurant to discuss it. Then she talked more about it with me out by the curb. The sky was gray. We were leaning on her car. She didn't want me to tell anyone that Alex had stolen from her, or that she had found the cough syrup bottles, so I kept her secret. I didn't want to be the manipulative friend who always tries to encourage their friends to end their relationships and go single. But I knew that she wanted to hear it. In the end, she decided not to. Her reasons weren't all too romantic. She felt like she knew Alex too well to let him go. She felt like he was a nicer person than her in certain ways she wasn't giving him credit for. She felt like she might be able to force herself to be in love with him again if she could just try harder. And she was afraid that if she wanted to be a musician, her skills were not enough. Alex and her still hadn't done anything serious music wise, but it was true that Alex was skilled. He could play three or four instruments, and he had written songs that were half decent. Could she really let go of someone that talented? And most importantly, the basement still needed remodeling. They couldn't just leave her mother's basement without finishing it.

I tried to explain to her that all the things she saw in him that she didn't want to let go of, she could still maintain as a friend. They could move away from one another, and Alex and her, with the friendship they still had, could still play music. It's uncommon but not unheard of for exes to play music or work together. She could still visit him. But his life would be his life and her life would be hers. She didn't like the idea, and didn't want to make a decision. She was too afraid of what that might mean for her. She had been with Alex for six years, and the prospect of standing alone (though I would argue she was already doing that), caused existential dread.

David's outbursts were getting worse. All of us felt we were walking on egg shells. And there was nowhere to go. The best I could do was hide behind my pile of books, and hope to not make eye contact. My sympathetic nervous system was not given breaks. And the  same amount of daydreaming involved with keeping myself sane was also the same amount of daydreaming that would require I give up on my physical self entirely. So I would lay in bed, and I could not entirely let myself shut down to ignore him. I felt like an animal trapped in a corner, even when it wasn't aimed at me – and it often wasn't. It was aimed randomly at everyone, but generally it was my mother who fought with him the most. Usually it involved trying to get David to go to school. He was pushing things. It started feeling like something very violent and brutal was going to happen.

One morning, my mom was trying to tell David to go to school. By my assessment, she wasn't being unreasonable, yet. She told David to do something he didn't want to do, and suddenly he had become vicious and anything could happen. Allison had gone to school already, so it was my mother, myself and David down there. There was this awkward silence and we all knew that David was about to explode. I was rapidly trying to calibrate myself to this outburst that I knew was coming. My blood was flowing, I was having troubles breathing. I kept reminding myself to stay out of it by any means necessary. I tried to remind myself that I was in control of myself.

He started screaming at my mother, calling her a cunt and a whore and completely dehumanizing her. It felt murderous and sick. I couldn't take it anymore. It was too much like my father had made me feel. I stepped up and started telling David to knock it off, that our mother had only been polite to him and his reaction was insane. I said this calmly at first. I had tricked myself momentarily to believe I was not mad. I had jumped in, I think, assuming that I could maintain a calm face, and David could freak out and only get the mirror in his face as it had no reaction on me. But then he turned this argument entirely at me. He began calling me fat, worthless. I arrogantly tried to deflect these statements. I had only lost three pounds in that entire month and I was feeling pretty bad about it. And as I stood there taking his insults, I realized too late that my skin was too thin for this.

As he continued to call me a fat cunt, I suddenly felt this rise in me – this need to destroy what was hurting me. There was nothing else around us. Only him – or some version of him that I hated with every element of my being, and me. I felt like I was going to die if I didn't fight for my life. The sound went out of my ears. The next thing I know I was on top of him punching him repeatedly in the face as hard as I could. I couldn't stop, holding his head down to continue punching him. I didn't intend on stopping. I intended to punch until there was nothing left. Distantly, I could hear my mother crying and begging me to stop. It distracted me, and she pleaded with me 'RENEE, HE'S MY SON!!' This hit me for a moment. I looked down at David's swollen face. It's one of the most horrible pitiful sights I have ever seen in my life. His eyes were empty and almost dead with pain. I'd never seen anything quite like it. He was accepting these punches. It was spiraling down into something deep inside of him. He wasn't fighting back. I had destroyed something. I was breaking him, I was beating some creature full of shame. He wasn't just the enemy. He was the little boy I had helped raise. I probably punched him thirty times before I stopped. I stopped, realizing what I had done, and I ran out of the house. I never wanted to go back again.

In the moment, I had felt powerful. It's an ugly thing to grasp, that breaking of boundaries, that reclaiming of something for myself that I had never had before. I had felt this sense of justice and liberation and power that nothing had ever made me feel. Maybe psychologically I wasn't just punching him. Maybe I had been punching everyone in my life who had ever knocked me down spanning from early childhood. I had always been such a meek person on the receiving end of life. What he reduced it all to, and what he made me feel was a condensed conduit to all those feelings of being victimized and weak. And I don't remember deciding to punch him. If I had made the decision, I never would have chosen to do something like that to David.. I knew lived in the same shit world that I did, only he had less armor than me. He couldn't recede into the day world quite like I could. He had no savior in his life or friend like I did Sarah. The world was a dark and insecure place. And reality was ugly. He had been horrible to me, Allison and my mother – I won't deny that he was a monster at times, but he was also someone I loved and knew to have an enormous heart. He was very young, and nobody had cared enough to see him truly, or understand. And I had probably made the world so much more shittier for him, perhaps permanently. I had betrayed and broken some fundamental boundary. I had probably broken his heart.

The feeling of power of course abandoned me as soon as I found myself walking around down the dirty side roads of Lewiston. My hand hurt. I hadn't prepared my fist to become a weapon, and I had broken a few of my fingers in the process. My arm was swollen and throbbing. There was this inexplicable smell of suffering all around me. It had all happened so fast. One second I had been thinking of other things, the next I was trying to kill someone with my hands. Cars drove by and were indifferent. I felt myself feeling lost, and panicked, hideous. Reality seemed heightened and yet faded. And here I thought life had been getting better – here I thought I had been an instrument of self improvement. Here I was 'winning friends and influencing people'. Passerby passengers gawked at me as I cried. I probably looked crazy. Sarah didn't work that day, else I would have walked to her work and waited for her to get off. I was alone, and this was the world that I was trapped in.  And I had done something now that I could never take back. And I was alone in that decision.

I did eventually come back. I opened the screen door and slipped through, hoping to see my mother first. David was in his bed.  I detected no life from him, though there was that now familiar strange feeling of deep suffering I couldn't put a name to. The corner he slept in seemed darker than normal, as if he were sucking the light out of it. I had created a black hole. My mother looked at me from her laptop. Her eyes were accusing, and yet besides themselves. I don't remember what I said to her. By this point, perhaps we were beyond words. She wasn't mad at me. She was disassociating. It was too much. She was lost deeply in the electronic drug of her laptop. I tip toed to the other side of the bedroom, David on one end, I on the other. I let the black emptiness sink into me as I lay down in my book coffin. Allison came home, and I could hear my mother whispering to her what had happened. Eventually, I talked to Allison in the upstairs bathroom. David was still laying in bed. He laid there for the most part for several days, not speaking. Even in his silence, I felt like he was a different person.

We weren't on speaking terms after that. I generally tried to make even more space for him than I had already, letting him go on the few trips to the store with our mother. I had to come to terms with what had happened. It felt hard for me to blame myself the way I would generally. I couldn't remember the moment between standing there angry and suddenly being well into the act of attacking him. Had I remembered that moment, I would have been able to capture the exact emotion that spurred it on, to analyze it, make myself better from it. But all I could do was look back at the entire spectacle of violence, and realize what I was capable of – as an animal that wasn't in my keep. I didn't want to think about it, but it gave me this awakened realization that I could kill if I had to. I didn't want to glorify this realization. I didn't think it made me tough, or cool. It made me feel sick. I felt isolated. It was hard to own up to. But I knew myself better from the incident, all the while I knew myself less from it.

I was distracted though by something else as well. I woke up one Thursday morning from an emotional dream. In the dream, my father was going to kill himself. He was suffering. I could feel that suffering in my skin when I woke up. It felt real somehow, like a conversation I had truly had with him. I couldn't even say it was abstract. I knew there was something. I told my mom about it, and she suggested that I call him. I waited a day, anxious about giving into something I told myself I wasn't going to do. But then I began taking a different perspective. My father was not someone I was close to. He had indeed killed our connection in some way. Of course, deep in my psyche he would always live, there would always be that version of him in my thoughts somewhere, helping me through life and pushing me backwards at time. But I also knew from that point of our final fight had been something final. He wouldn't be able to reach me emotionally.

But then he was also a human being with a life, even if he wasn't my dad. I could find in myself, the empathy to check up on him, not as a daughter or a friend, but as a self aware fellow human being who had some sense that there was something wrong. I didn't want him to die. I had the power to do either one - I could not call, hope for the best (or the worst), and see what happened. Some part of me felt it would be more convenient for me to not make the call. If he died, then that would be the poetry and tragedy of his existence. I could appreciate that from a literary perspective. His physical death perhaps could solidify where I stood with him emotionally. But that was selfish and I knew it. Not everything was about me. Even if we never spoke to one another ever again, his life was his before I was born, and he deserved to continue to have that life with or without me in it.

So pushed myself and I made the call. When he answered the phone he sounded shaken, and panicked. The conversation didn't make too much sense. He asked if he could see me so we could talk. I agreed to meet with him at bike path by the river that evening. The sun was setting when I got there. The air was cold and brisk. My father got out of his truck like a wounded man. His color was off. He was shaky and struggling to come up with words. He looked around him suspiciously, as though he suspected he was being followed. I stood there observing all of this with a detached confusion. We began walking down the path, and he started talking about how 'they' were back again. I realized he was talking about the police/FBI or whathaveyou from the years before. I was confused. He hadn't done anything illegal in years. Hadn't we gotten rid of the evidence? What was this about?

After we had left him, he had fallen apart, spiraling into some kind of vague paranoid certainty that it was all over for him. The police were back – they were following him. He whispered these things to me, as he believe that it was possible the police had bugged the trees we walked besides. I had to eventually convince him that I hadn't gotten a hold of the police personally, something he had decided was true. He asked me over and over, looking into my eyes with this fearful blank look, had the police gotten to me? Had they? I was baffled and told him no. I knew he was too far gone into this nightmare to be reached, but I offhandedly tried my best to ask the sort of questions that might wipe away some of the vague certainties he had.

We went back to the house. He picked up Allison. I had convinced Allison that going with him might be a good idea, since he might be able to pay for her to get some new clothes. So she went with us. We stopped by Arby's. There was a  man eating by himself two seats down. My father was convinced this man was an FBI agent. Randomly, I tried to lighten the conversation by talking to Allison about unrelated subject matter. This entire thing was unpleasant, but I was going to try to make the best of it. I wasn't going to let my father's madness get to me. I wasn't going to let myself get too sympathetic. But I was going to try to stop him from doing anything stupid, and in order to be that person I needed to be a good actor for the cause. Randomly, as Allison and I were eating our food, he would hush us – even though we weren't making any remarks that would arouse suspicion. And how could we? We had done nothing wrong.

Somehow, my father pressured us to going back to Kendrick with him. I didn't want to. I so didn't want to. That town as dead to me – I had emotionally cut ties with that side of my life - forever. I hadn't been back there since the fight. Every nook of that town held some bitter sweet, bitter more than sweet memory of a bygone time in my youth. It was all tainted and stained by a consuming emptiness that cut to the heart of something inside me. It was over for me now and I was a new person. Going back to Kendrick was an unpleasant reminder of my roots. It made me feel the loss of things I couldn't quite imagine or explain. It had only been two months, but I had changed so much in that time.

Inside the house, nothing had changed since the day we left. I was aghast to find that the pumpkin that we had in the middle of the living room had been left to rot for two months. It smelled horrible. The house was freezing. It was already night time. It was twenty-thirty or so degrees in there. We could see our breath. How was he living in this dungeon? Absently, we were informed that the beloved neighbor cat, Tux, had died that year. She had been a family member to us – even when my own cat Nim was still there I preferred Tux, and her death only further cemented the end of an era in Kendrick. Allison and I once again, tried to make the best of it. He whispered and told us we weren't allowed to talk in the house at all. This made absolutely no sense. He said we could only talk outside. It a very cold very dark night, in the teens. I shivered and my skin started to burn when we went out there. We walked towards the roaring river. Still, my father insisted on whispering. He told me that 'they' had done something to his body. He had woken in the night to someone walking around his house, and the sound of some electronic crackling all around him, like the air had turned electric. His bones and skin were weak. He had stood up out of bed, and suddenly a green luminous light had passed slowly through the house, as if to scan it like an X-ray. He had thrown up.

Then he told us that police had followed him to his job, and when he got back to his vehicle, he had found powder on the door and all over the inside of the dashboard. And he then explained that he had befriended some guy at work, who he had told something to, and this man was part of it. This guy used to work for law enforcement and was looking to get back in. I was taken aback by it all. One part of me held into account that perhaps the investigating had started again. If that was the case however, they would have found nothing. There was no evidence and we hadn't done anything wrong. Even if there were some loose links in the situation, if they had enough evidence to convict my father for anything, I knew they wouldn't have wasted time. And what kind of technology could that even have been? Were there radiated X-rays that they could use to scan the insides of homes?

My father's eyes were swirly globes of fear. He also started talking about death, in a very abstract way, and then in a more immediate way. About how we had left him, and how he had nothing left. It was all over. He admitted that he was going to commit suicide that Monday. Had I not called him, he would do that. He had his gun ready, as well as a suicide note. He couldn't live this way. I walked composed and listened, Allison following suit. He kept looking around, sometimes stopping to say 'Do you hear that??!?', but of course I couldn't. And if I had heard something it would more than likely have been an animal. Nobody was going to sit out by the river in this kind of weather.

For about ten minutes, Allison and I were frightened that my father was going to kill us. It's not that he was threatening us directly. But his abstract way of talking about death and about us, the way he seemed to want to break our boundaries we had set up and cling to us like a wild frenzied animal hell bent on dragging us down to hell with him. For the first ten minutes of that walk, I had this painful realization that this walk could be the last walk we ever too, perhaps he had schizophrenia, and the voices told him to kill us? What if he had thought it was me all along who had called 'them'. What if he thought I was an imposture? At this point, anything was possible. I had long given up my preconceived notions for what would come next. Allison looked fearfully in my eyes, and later told me she felt the same way. I could picture us so well, both of our bodies frozen by the river, heads both bashed in by rocks. It would not have been a murder out of vengeance or rage. It would have been some aspect of my father's obscure suicide. Something more symbolic to his state of mind – a testament to how afraid he was to lose us. Perhaps a mercy killing.

We didn't die that night. And I came to believe that his madness was an external delusion manifested from his sheer inability to accept anything about himself. Perhaps the case had been reopened. It was hard for me to know for certain, and I guess I never will know. It doesn't matter though because there was no evidence that could be used, and there never would be. And lastly, maybe when this inner paradigm shift had happened, maybe it wasn't just me. Maybe it had affected everyone around me. And my father was too sensitive and weak to comprehend it and it had driven him insane? All of these were theories I held. I had no idea if they held any merit. Reality was getting fuzzier and fuzzier. It was hard work grasping for facts, and it was even harder to grasp for wisdom in the madness.

PART 86 - https://tinyurl.com/y8fcu787

PART 85 - https://tinyurl.com/y73j3s9z

PART 84 - https://tinyurl.com/y8chr6hw

PART 83 - https://tinyurl.com/yasrxfkj

PART 82 - https://tinyurl.com/y9wvecz3

PART 81 - https://tinyurl.com/yc7bm62r

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-80 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-8

#text #writing #life story