How to Build a Broken Boy – 2: Woman Zero
The first woman who taught me fear also taught me how to survive it. Though not how to cope.
This is part 2 in an ongoing series exploring how I was made and how sex shaped me for better and for worse.
Read Part 1 – Hard to Swallow
Read Part2 – Woman Zero
Read Part 3 – Playing Hot Dog
Read Part 4 – Lady 2.0
Read Part 5 – Trailer Park Incest
Read Part 6 – Table Turning
Prologue
Before you dive in, be aware, this is deeply personal, extremely raw and contains experiences and offensive, triggering or repulsive language. Please proceed with caution if you decide to go on this journey with me.
Names have been changed, otherwise, this is a recounting of real events.
As I stated in part 1, sex has been a part of my reality as long as I can recall a reality. But not in the healthy natural part of human existence way. My understanding was distorted for a long time. And if I’m honest, I still don’t think I have a healthy relationship with it.
In this entry, I explore what would likely be termed a 'found memory'. An experience with an aunt that has never added up and I can only summarize there is something deeper which I cannot explain.
The Rich Relatives
I have always known her as Aunt Dana. My mom called her Lola. She and my grandmother were the only two who used her middle name. Everyone else, my dad included, called her Snake. She loved snakes. She kept a big boa in a glass aquarium in her living room. And a smaller species in the foyer.
I would say it was a cobra. But that seems ludicrous. She did have these two 3 foot cobra statues in her living room flanking the fireplace. So maybe that’s just my imagination.
Aunt Dana, like Mom, was a hell-raiser. The kind of woman who drank and smoked and didn't mind mixing it up. See my previous essay when she and Mom had it out in the front yard. She also, as I would later learn, ran cocaine for a cartel in the area. Specifically, my Uncle Chad did, but Aunt Dana was neck deep. This was the source of their lush lifestyle, not the construction and tile business that gave the family legitimacy.
In any case, her persona was all swagger and confidence.
I don't ever remember feeling super comfortable at my Aunt and Uncle’s house. It was way, way nicer than ANYONE else we knew. The property was packed with all kinds of grown-up toys. Tools. Boats/watercraft. Motorbikes. Lots of guns. Heavy equipment that even today I visualize as overgrown Tonka trucks. And they always drove nice cars. A new Mazda RX-7 and Subaru Brat were Aunt Dana's daily drivers. Uncle Chad drove a shiny white and blue Bronco.
The big A-frame they built still exists here in Dust Meridian. I drove out a few weeks ago as the sun rose and parked across the street. It wasn’t as large or impressive as it is in my memory. Still a very nice home.
I thought about Jenny throwing rocks at her dad's house in Forest Gump and how they later pushed it down with a big tractor.
Real life isn't fiction though. The tall roof and all-glass face of the house sits two acres back from the gate on State Hwy 79, so I'd need a rocket launcher or trebuchet to hit it. If I ever be come a billionaire, I'll fly in on my helicopter and offer them an immoral amount of money, then buy a bulldozer and push it down.
For now, like with Keith's, I just won't ride my bike by there anymore. I hadn’t in decades, no need to start now.
In their big house, there was always what I now know as drug paraphernalia. Not as if I remember them doing drugs around or in front of me, but there were more than a few sleep-overs where the next day I would see the aftermath of drug-parties. Wall splashed with various fluids, spent condoms, empty beer and whiskey bottles everywhere, and mirrored tables (they LOVED mirrored tables) covered in ash, dirty plates and a dusty residue.
Hello, Smut
Another off-putting feature of the home, was my cousin’s showcasing their parent's stash of pornography. I must have been too young to understand it, because it didn't interest me enough to recall it other than to know there were stacks and stacks of magazines in the upstairs closet behind two louvered bifold doors. We had the same doors in our home. I never liked them.
I DO recall the Zap! And FREAK comix collection. They were essentially cartoon pornography. I think my cousins knew I liked to draw and used it as an opportunity for a little grooming, Though they were also very young, so it is likely they were imitating what had been done to them.
While I have no memory of the specifics of what were likely Hustler and Playboy magazines, I'll never forget the outrageous drawing in those underground adult comics. That's what the publishing industry calls them. But they were smut. Huge-breasted anthropomorphic cat-women with bulbous nipples protruding from barely covering blouses, and strangely apparent penises throughout. And the characters were all sort-of grimy, drawn with a heavy ink line and lots of little bits of ink that indicate something being hairy or dirty.
The other kinds of content is fuzzy, but I know it was pornographic. Writing about it still triggers some kind of hormone in me. It's pleasing and disgusts me. How strange a thing. Imagery is powerful, even poorly drawn.
Later I would learn that the majority artist for these was Robert Crumb, and those who would imitate him. I came to love his work and style in other genres, though not the content of those books.
I don't recall my Aunt ever molesting me. I think that's important to state. That even though the trauma clouds the past, there was absolutely a sexual component to life with and around here. All three of my cousins were molested (the eldest who would go on to molest me) by her step-father, uncle Chad. My older cousin, just two years older than me is an absolute basket case today, as are all of her children. Well, those still alive.
Escaping from School
When I was six or seven there was an event that is still clear as day and a recollection that things were never the same after.
My Aunt came to pick me up from grade school. I may have been feeling ill and mom wasn't available, but in my memory, it is a surprise that I got a note to go to the office and my aunt was there saying she was supposed to pick me up.
What child isn't happy to leave school early? So away we went. It was a cold and snowy winter day in Dust Meridian. Back then, snow could last for weeks; now it's gone in hours.
As we pulled away from the school, she asked me if I was hungry. I was a fat kid. Well, I remember being a fat kid. My cousins called me fat. What few photos survived the fire in 1981 don't render me as a fat child. How odd that I remember being so self-conscious of it.
I digress. I said, 'yes! I'm starved'. And aunt Dana took me to McDonalds where I got a cheeseburger happy meal.
Reader, if we're born after 1980, you likely don't realize, McDonald's USED to be a special treat. At least in families of my economic status. So a happy meal in the middle of the day was a HUGE deal.
I had finished the delicious cheeseburger (I still LOVE McDonald's cheeseburgers—though I haven't had one in YEARS) and was working to consume the quickly soggi-fying fries when I heard her ask, “Do you want a DONUT!?'
I MELTED! How could this get ANY BETTER? Happy meal AND a donut in the middle of the day when I was supposed to be bored in social studies? Yes please.
So, Aunt Dana pulls into a parking lot and I hear the little rotary engine start to scream. All of a sudden, we're sliding sideways can and the car's spinning circles. I am pressed against the passenger door worried it will come open and I'd fly into space (we didn't wear seatbelts in those days and I had fallen out of cars TWICE by this point.
She is laughing a guffawing and thinking it's coolest thing in the world. I was scared and wondering when I was going to get my donut. She is VERY amused when I tell her that it was fun, and ask if we were going to the donut shop next.
I recall her brushing my cheek with the back of her hand and telling me I was a sweet child.
What came next is the confusing part.
Thighs and Vaginas
All of sudden, she's driving us out of town to her house on the highway and she has no pants on. Or shoes, or underwear. There is a dark furry patch between her legs that makes me very nervous. Her plaid, pearl snap shirt is open at the navel and parts and drapes to rest on the outside of either hip. I sit quietly, afraid to speak or move. She looks serious as we drive to her home. After we arrive, I remember her helping me out of my puffy orange coat in the foyer adjacent to her dining room and kitchen where she kept the big snake sometimes. The next recollection I have, she reads to me from the comics in the closet.
We are lying in her big bed upstairs with the mirrored tiles on the ceiling. I can see her naked body next to me, long blond hair splashing down over her breasts. I am a black blot in my memory.
I had never seen a naked woman before this.
The Aftermath
At home once, I went down stairs and walked in on my parents having sex on the vinyl couch. But I was bleary-eyed and had no idea what I was seeing. The memory of my aunt left nothing to my ignorant imagination. After then, I knew what all the parts of a grownup girl were.
As I said, I have no recollection of any physical action. My brain worked overtime to put that all away. Just the circumstances and the fact that while I was never fully comfortable in her home, I was terrified after that to be there without my parents. I never spent the night under her roof again.
I hate to dredge this up and maybe it's a young mind completely misreading the situation. It is impossible to know. And maybe pointless, except to try to understand why I am who I am.
The later abuse at the hands of my cousins were integers in the equation that I use to draw the conclusion that she was probably high and out of her mind. I don't think it was this event that led to several years of bedwetting from 6-9, but it certainly was a contributing factor.
Enuresis (technical term for bedwetting) is caused by many factors and isn't about bladder control. Witnessing violence, neglect, prolonged instability, sexual abuse, they can all contribute to an effect a child's nervous system that leaves them apoplectic and in a constant-fight-or-flight state.
The Reckoning
While this is all part of the toolset that built me, I am not bitter. I am sadder that I feel like I never knew my Aunt. Before I would reach ten, my uncle Chad would die of a mysterious heart attack, leaving Aunt Dana to figure out how to run the construction/tile business that was the vehicle for smuggling drugs in from Mexico.
When she lost that tie, she turned to petty theft and armed robbery. I only found this out when she was arrested and sentenced to 20 years for robbing a pharmacy. It wasn't her first, but it was the last one she would rob. In prison, she got clean and got a degree of some kind and when she was released on parole, ended in New Mexico working as an executive assistant for Texas Electric.
Her children's lives (my cousins) were a disaster. They ended up living with and being raised by my grandmother where I suspect they continued to be abused by my uncle. But more on HIM later.
Of the three children, the youngest died about 20 years ago from a heart attack. Indications are that the mysterious cause that killed my uncle, also killed my cousin. My middle cousin is an accomplished nurse in Dust Meridian whom I have not seen in about 15 years. The eldest of the three, Misheen—
She was the next to expose me to sex. I'll dive in on that in Chapter 3.
It's a horrible thing to not be able to know with confidence if someone was an abuser or if I'm just assigning baggage where it doesn't belong. I know with certainty that 8-9 year old me wasn't having sex with his 30 year old Aunt. I'm not a father, but I am fairly confident it isn't physically possible. But when people do drugs, everything is on the table. And a defenseless child certainly is a low-hanging fruit.
I've never asked my mother about this. As I stated previously, we didn't discuss sex, or sex organs. It was like those parts of us didn't exist. It is a strange matter looking back. But Mom was a practicing alcoholic until I was 11 or 12 and Dad was raised by an abusive mother and a string of men with whom she shared a bed. Neither of them had the tools they needed to properly prepare a boy for the world.
I shudder to think what my sisters experienced.
In any case. She is dead. Whatever she was guilty of, she paid the ultimate price for it and lived the kind of life that allowed her to do the things she did. What cruelties must have been inflicted on her to put her in this state?
Recently, when my sister-in-law died, my mother opened up to me about how devastating her own sister's death was. I was so preoccupied with being a young adult I never did more than say 'sorry mom'. But she expressed that it was easily the most difficult loss she has ever experienced.
I state this because you may wonder, 'why don't you discuss this with your parents and clear the air?'
Either my mom was aware of matters (in periphery if nothing else), and chose to ignore it (VERY COMMON pre-2000's) or she was completely ignorant of everything. The truth is probably somewhere in between. In any case, the wages have been paid, my mother has her own crosses to bear in her old age and as a dutiful son, I cannot add another albatross around her neck.
I have little affection for almost any of my family. This is a great loss to me. But I realize that it is a defensive mechanism. My way of coping with a flood of mistreatment and abuse.
Reflection
My advice to parents is always: NEVER let your child leave your sight. The one's you trust the most are the most likely to violate it most profoundly.
Or, in my case, for-go the privilege of parent-hood. It is an extreme measure, but the only way to guarantee that your little Lorien or Seren will never be confronted with circumstances like this.
Fear taught me to survive; survival taught me to remember.
This was easier to write about than chapter one, leaving me filled with disappointment more than anger.
Cope is a work in progress.
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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