2

Once, I tried to talk more honestly and easily with W___, my closest friend at the time, because he complained that I never talked about myself and let him talk all day long.
I would begin calmly, but I stayed trapped in these vague, measured, reveries about the South and how there’s a reason its beauty is haunting. That violence isn’t aggression it’s actually assertion. Violence’s truest definition is something deep, deep on the inside. Assertiveness is extraordinarily more violent than aggressiveness.

He started saying, in a friendly, joking way, that my stories were from ‘my world’ because it was unrecognizable to the world he knew.
Him not realizing that 'my world' was the one he was standing on, and ‘his world’ was built on mine. All of America was built on its own horrors. The beautiful future built on top of the horrific past.

He started talking about his own thoughts on the subject of Abuse, him not realizing.
_I think those kinds of people should keep that stuff to themselves,_ he said. And, _Everyone always has options, they could've done something about it if they wanted to._

And I think what could they do. They were small children, what was their option, to somehow instantly not be a small child? Has he even met these social workers, these cops. Sometimes the only option a small child has is to pick up a weapon.
And they did. There was a boy, maybe twelve, thirteen years old, who killed his whole family and then shot himself not four miles from the House.
There was a girl in Alaska who killed her guardian, her grandmother. There were children killing adults all over the place in those days.
The Americans with their cops and journalists, all said the same things: _How could this happen?_ _What is happening to this country?_ Afterward, they put the child away for good.
W____ tells me those are isolated incidents and don't mean anything and aren't a part of Real Life. But I'm standing right in front of him.

Sometimes, even as an adult, I catch myself calling them 'the Americans'. Even though, if there were a true record that included every American that ever lived on this land, it would show that easily the majority came from Abuse -- Slavery is one obvious example, indentured servants, another, the poor, the native Americans .. That easy majority lived harrowing lives like mine, not to mention horrific ones.

I know I am of that majority, that my blood is part of those generations of blood stained into the American flag, but I'm surrounded by these other Americans whom I cannot understand.
When they find a four year old covered in blood, who's not crying, their first thought is that he's done something evil. Or when they walk into a house and find one child and a set of dead parents, their first thought is that the child is wrong, not good, that the child's act was one of aggression, not assertiveness.
Once, a girl told her doctor that the reason she was beaten and injured between her legs was because of her Guardian raping her. The doctor acts like he doesn't hear her then walks out into the hallway and tells the same Parent what she said. In that way when we were kids, we had to be careful the Americans didn't get us and damage us even more with their Child Protective Services.
Not to mention cops who found us criminal on principle, and teachers who looked at us with disdain. Like the way even now when a child kills his parents or guardians the Americans are so horrified they don't know what to do.
Meanwhile, if it's a child who's been set on fire by his father and burned alive to its death, or a child who's been smothered by his mother and set out in the trash, the Americans know exactly what to do, how to act, they know exactly the things to say as they lament the child's death. Reporters, cops, teachers, therapists, all of them know exactly how to act and what to say. Meanwhile the child is dead, and in the first scenario the child was ALIVE.

I went to therapy after I found out that my mostly rural county had a program that placed those who needed counseling with local therapists on a sliding scale payment plan. I had already done my own research, and each book I read insisted therapy was essential. I went and both times the therapist had no idea what I was talking about.

Before I met my first therapist I sat in the waiting room wondering if I was anything like the crazies around me. Later it was told to me that my appointment was dropped because the therapist didn't have time for me.
While I had been waiting there I had my first flashback, because the waiting room reminded me of another waiting room I had sat in at social services when I was a boy.
Meanwhile, I'm dealing with the young receptionist who’s rescheduling me. She’s wearing makeup and a condescending manner. Whenever I deal with the Americans, I think about these things I know to be true, and wonder what happened to all the real Americans, the ones like me, the ones I come from, the majority. I think where did all these Ridiculous Americans, like this receptionist, come from? How did they start outnumbering us?

W___ is training to be a cop, and he tells me about how his dream job would be as an FBI agent. I couldn’t stop my untamed mind from remembering the day I slammed the book shut. When I was twelve, I had seen _The Silence of the Lambs._ Then I read the book. Then I read other books on the FBI, and planned my future, all the way through law school, and Quantico.

Then I got to this chapter on profilers, how upon seeing a crime scene they could figure out a criminal’s personality and past experiences in order to track the person down. Finally the chapter ended with a list of the experiences that create serial killers: and I checked most of them off because I had already experienced them. I slammed the book shut, realizing again that these new Americans, these Ridiculous ones, they were trouble.

Not only were they ridiculous, they were loud. Always loud. I had this job at the sandwich shop/gas station in the small town nearest us. I was sixteen and not liked much in that town. I’m not sure why. I was silent and people didn’t like that. Silent people are supposed to have a submissive look in their eye and I was told mine was the opposite. I would get glared at in the local Food Lion. The town grew out of being a railroad stop; now it was an interstate stop. The customers at the store tended to be from far away places driving vehicles of kinds I’d never seen before.

This one night, M___ walked into the store.
She and her cousin, V____, and his little sister all lived across the field from the House back in the days that God’s Country was at its worst -- and it’s most harrowingly beautiful -- because we were so small.
We were not allowed to cross the field, but I guess they were. They had this dog that was best friends with our dog, and who’d visit each other by crossing the field. That’s how we met. V__ was blonde, blue-eyed, and had a football -- something I’d never seen in real life. He found this amazing. He showed me how to place my fingers in its laces. M__ had a boy’s haircut and dark skin. My little sister, H___, asked me if M__ was a boy or a girl.
I remember being frightened that afternoon, standing out in the yard with M___ and V___, because Mom was inside and I knew it would only be a matter of time. Mom was a beautiful woman. People said she looked like Cher, and she did. She had this wildness about her that matched the land; a haunting to match, too, I guess, one that some called mental illness. The wild look just behind her eyes explained the way she could lash out. For some unknown reason, she didn’t that day. She gave us all ice cream.

That summer afternoon haunts me. I already had a list of claims. Not to mention my first memory of being drowned in the kitchen sink; being made black and blue by Dad whenever I had a dirty diaper; what had happened in the Mustang; A__’s supposed ghost in the window; Mom slowly choosing Dad over me, becoming more and more hateful to me; A___, from the moment I was born, telling people that when she grew up she was going to marry me, something that would send a chill down my spine.
M____ and V____ also had Claims by that time. And none of us had even seen third grade. M___ was already being raped regularly. V____ was being beaten. Once V__’s dad tired of M____ he began on V__’s little sister, B___, who -- when I was sixteen -- was sent home from third grade for trying to have sex with a classmate.

I had recently heard the gossip about B___ being sent home, when M___ and a friend of hers walked into the store. She still had a boy’s haircut. They were on break from a shift at the local fast food restaurant. She recognized me but didn’t say anything other than her order. I asked her what kind of sandwich she wanted, and what she wanted on it.

The people who have the greatest Claims are incidentally the people with the most Untellables. Stories they can’t imagine describing in words, not to mention speaking out loud. Untellables and Claims that seemed to always be whispering in the background in those years when we were teenagers, like a storm slowing forming in the sky around us. Only for those few years were they satisfied with being merely whispers. It was inevitable that they would turn on their own hero or heroine. When they finally were insulted to that point when they would lash out, that point when they realized they weren’t Untellables or Claims anymore, but Secrets.

M___’s friend was loud loud, as were my co-workers; all the young people were loud in those days .. like they had no respect. M___’s friend laughing obnoxiously as she flirted with another teenager and they talked about Ridiculous things.
M__ gave me only one look of knowing. It cut me to the bone.

In those moments as I prepared M’s order, the Untellables, all the Claims, every incident that ever happened in God’s Country, seemed to swirl around us, like the quick birth of a tornado, lustfully breathing in as much life as possible, spinning wildly, destroying anything and everything as it screams its desire, and quickly dies down, gone like the grandest storm of lightning, so that a passerby would blink and wonder if they had really just seen that, as I rung M___ s sandwhich up.

Then her friend wanted a drink, but I didn’t understand what she was saying.
She then said, _I just want a soda. That’s all I want, a soda._
I didn’t comprehend a word, just followed her eyes to the stack of cups she had glanced at when she said it and I rang her up for that.
M__ looked at me again as they were leaving, her friend talking to her in her gross, ridiculous manner.
At the time I didn’t think in words, seemed like I didn’t have any back then. I just went back to work.
The story seemed funny to me later. The way the Untellables were so loud they actually drowned these new-Americans right out.

Months later, as I was working the gas-station side of the store, I would see V____ for the last time. The front of the building was made up of huge store-front windows that flooded the place with sunlight in the afternoons, the kind of sunlight you can see dust floating in.
I hear the bell on the door and turn and look but see no one at first, because the person is wearing white and is invisible in that sunlight.
Then I see a slight rustle. At first I thought it must be V___’s ghost, then realized he was still alive, he had only gone Ghost. It was what the Untellables and Claims did to young people, made them so silent and full of stories at the same time, that they numbed out into oblivion.
V___ stepped up to the counter with a soda. He had that 100-mile stare in his eyes, and held his mouth in a gape. His skin was pale white. I knew that V___’s dad was a drug addict and that now V___ was long gone into abuse of his own. I rang up his drink and he left.
Just like that. I would never lay eyes on either M___ or V___ again. After all that happened out in God’s Country, it was like we all just disappeared, like none of it ever happened, like all of American history had never happened, like maybe it was all just a dream. An intoxicatingly beautiful, hauntingly lustful, wildly colorful dream.

Years later, when I was first out on my own, in my first apartment, it still wasn’t necessary to articulate the Untellables. I was working menial labor sixty and eighy hours a week and remained surrounded by coworkers and neighbors who had Claims and Untellables of their own.
We were so easily forgiving of each other. Me and a friend could sit over whiskey in my first apartment laughing it up, talking endlessly, and it never became an issue that most of our lives were wordless.

Since we all came from Claims we just understood each other. We gave a knowing, acknowledging look when a person would say something like, _I don’t really have no people._
Or the polite allowance of the pause that happened after the words: _back when I was at that place I come from?_ before the speaker continued with something like: _I used to like the color blue back then for some reason. Liked it so much I would steal blue things from all kinds of places and collect them under my bed .._
At holidays we knew to not ask rude questions like _What are you going to be doing on Christmas?_ We knew to politely tip toe around each other.
Somehow, as time went by, we were allowed that less and less. Somehow living like that became toxic and our lives seemed to be falling apart, until we again disappeared from each other ..

That’s why I don’t know how to tell my story about the Abuse. I tried here but I guess I ruined it, in a kind of long, running, tangent-filled way. I seem to have this stubborn wish that I could be around M___ and V___ again like that one summer when we were little, or around the people I knew when I was eighteen and first out on my own.
We knew what we knew and it was okay to not know the words; it wasn’t required to acknowledge the lives we had lived, only to live what was left of it. We noticed the things not said and kindly allowed it. We noticed the huge gaps in each others’ stories but never questioned each other about them. And somehow, somehow, it would work this time. I guess that idea’s the real dream.

__________