I watched, helplessly, one night as he tried to drown my mom. He threw her into the sliding glass door and bruised the whole side of her body, and then threw her in the pool. He stood with his foot on her head. She couldn’t fight back. She didn’t have enough in her to try to stay alive. I don’t know what made him stop. There was nothing I could do about it because he’d do the same thing to me. When he came into my room to rape me, I didn’t have the physical or mental strength to beat him.
He was drinking a lot more and was allowing my mother’s bruises to be more visible. She’d go to work bruised and limping. One day she called in sick—she really did have the flu. They didn’t believe her so they sent two of the guys to the house with a made-up story. When they saw she was “okay,” they left.
After such a long time of living like this, it was “normal.” We lived our lives, went to work, and had friends. My sister said, in one of her TV interviews, that she didn’t realize we weren’t normal until somebody in high school said to her, “Where did you get all those bruises?” She said, “My father did it. It’s just how it is. It’s always been this way.”
In high school, I took a psychology class and learned about drinking disorders and abuse. I honestly didn’t know what normal was until then. I never talked to anyone about it, though. If any teacher would have asked the question, I’m sure I would have answered it. I would have the marks to prove my stories. But nobody ever asked.
Unfortunately, I think it’s up to the person being abused to make the first move. You’d like to think that your teachers notice, but what if they don’t? I was afraid that either a) the school would call my father and then, of course, I’d get the shit kicked out of me, or b) they wouldn’t believe me and nothing would change. Because nothing did. Nothing ever did change. You could call the cops and nothing would change. I would like to think that things are different now, that teachers pay attention to warning signs. They talk about kids who don’t do so well in school, but that’s not the only kind of kid to be looking at. They need to be looking at kids that do nothing but bury themselves in books. Because there’s a reason they’re doing that.
I wish I would have had the courage to tell the stories in a writing assignment in English class. Hypothetical stories, people pay attention to: “Why is she writing about a child getting beaten and a mother getting her head carved? What the hell is going on?” They do that with notebooks of kids who bring a gun to school.
There’s a lot of denial, too, such as, “Oh it can’t possibly be that bad,” and that’s why kids in my position don’t talk, even to neighbors who hear what’s going on. I think when you hear gunshots going off in a house you should be calling the cops. When you hear the same loud voices and tables being thrown several times a week, you should call the cops. I realize that there is a fine line between butting in where you don’t belong and stepping in to help, but it’s especially hard for kids to ask for help. Many times, they just act out, instead.
My sister’s junior and senior years, she became rebellious and defiant. Everything he forbade her from doing, she did anyway. Every time his answer was no, she rebelled against him. This caused her much physical pain and beatings. When Cheryl and my father were fighting, my mom and I couldn’t help her. She was doing what she wanted, and he wasn’t going to beat her down. To some extent, I was proud of my sister’s strength.
Cheryl pulled a fast one when she graduated from high school. She told me earlier in the week that they were going to Daytona for a party after graduation, but she told my parents she was going to Cocoa Beach with a couple of friends. The day they came to pick her up, she said, as she ran out the door, “See ya! I’m going to Daytona for a week,” and hauled ass out of the house.
When she returned, she moved out. She left the house at night, telling me that with or without my help she was moving out, never to come back home. While she was gone, I packed her clothes, books, and a few personal items and set them outside my bedroom window. When she came back at midnight, she loaded her stuff in her car and we said our good-byes through the window. She was finally free from the abuse. I was happy for her, but sad that my sister was gone, never to come home again.
My sister was the only one of us who finished college. She was pretty scrappy. She got her RN degree. She got to be head floor nurse at Florida Hospital. She did a lot with her life.
I think my mother accomplished for us children what she wanted to do. She kept everybody alive for us to all graduate high school. Our father got thrown out of my high school graduation because he was drunk and obnoxious. He made it through Cheryl’s because it was in the morning, but when I graduated, it was at night, and he was asked to leave. Mom didn’t get to see me graduate.
A few days after my high school graduation, my parents were—as usual—fighting. There was blood everywhere—my mother’s blood, of course; none of his was ever shed—and my father let me know that Mom was going to die that night. As if he was testing my loyalties, he asked, “What would you do if I killed her and you had to go on the run with me?”
I tried to appear calm as I told him that I would kill myself—I would slit my wrists. His answer was to hand me a knife and tell me, “If I kill your mom, you do it. Otherwise, I will.”
Right around then, I went to work for Rickie, moving houses. That didn’t last long, about six months, because my father was making his life miserable, calling him around the clock, carrying on. “How many hours did she work? How much money are you paying her?” I was there to help him get his business off the ground and make a few bucks for myself. Finally, Rickie just said, “Ya know …” and I knew what was coming. I said, “You want me to quit?” He said, “It’d be nice.”
That was the end of that. That short period of time didn’t give me much opportunity to get to know who Rickie was. He seemed like a decent enough guy—he was my big brother and protector, after all—but our father was hell-bent against us getting to know each other better.
There was no escape from him, ever, unless he was at the bar. I’d come home from work and think, “Oh thank God, his car isn’t there.” I’d have a couple hours to get my head together before he came in drunk. Sometimes he’d come in at 2:00 in the morning and literally pass out right by the door. Sometimes he could fight, and other times he was so drunk he couldn’t move.
If he was home, drinking all day, it was going to be bad. When he was starting to get too drunk, he’d take an hour nap, get up, and start drinking again. Take another nap, get up, start drinking again. That’s when he’d get violent. He was having one of those days when he tried to drown my mother in the pool. He’d been drinking all day, took a nap an hour before she got home, got up, made himself another drink, and started in on her the second she hit the door. There was no hope that day. He drank vodka on the rocks, all day long. Every day we’d have to buy a new bottle, the biggest one you could find. Every day. Cheap brand. Day, after day, after day, after day …
CHAPTER 16
Arizona
By 1986, when I was nineteen, my father developed a habit of lighting a barbecue grill in the house, for warmth. One day, he began seeing visions in the smoke. He swore he saw a phoenix bird and that it must be some sort of a message. He’d been watching Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and now all of a sudden he had an epiphany and a vision—he had to be wherever this flaming phoenix was.
Just a little north of Orlando is a town of spiritualists called Cassadaga. After his visions began, he started visiting Cassadaga once a week for about two months. I had to drive him. The psychic told him, “You need to go find your people in Arizona.” I thought, “You think he’s some nice man with a vision, and now I have to drive two thousand miles with him. You better hope I come back alive.” I was terrified that he was whacking out and there was no way I was going to survive this.
His decision was made: he was going and he wasn’t coming back. He was going to find his people and lead them, like the psychic told him. He loaded his stuff on a trailer and told me
to pack a week’s worth of clothes. That was a relief, because at least it sounded like I was going to come home. I hadn’t thought about how I was getting back to Florida. I just did what I was told.
I’m lucky I lived through the trip, because brutal rape became a nightly ritual. He drank vodka all day long, and every night when we stopped at a motel I was attacked, some nights multiple times. This went on for days, same routine: drink all day, beat and brutalize me at night. He sat behind me in the backseat and smacked me in the head when he didn’t like the way I was driving. I began to wearily think, “Fuck it, whatever. Just drink your bottle of booze, and let’s get it over with. I need a couple of hours of sleep and let’s go. It’s just who you are.” It stopped meaning anything after a while, but it never stopped hurting, physically or emotionally. It killed a part of me inside, the part that said there was any point in living.
As we drove through Louisiana bayou country, we stopped to eat. He must have sensed that I couldn’t take any more and was on the verge of saying something to someone—anyone—so he told me that if I made one wrong comment in the restaurant I would end up in the alligator swamp, which was across the road, and be their lunch. I was in so much pain and so bruised, with a split lip, that when we checked in to the motel that night, the manager asked me if I needed help. My father pulled out his pistol and told him if he wanted to live, he had better ignore everything he saw or heard. That night he only raped me once, because I was bleeding so badly.
Finally, we got to the Arizona border and I began to feel like there might be a light at the end of this interminably long tunnel. I could drop him off with “his people” and hightail it out of there, and never have to see him again. But once we arrived, he wouldn’t even get out of the car. He looked around at the barren landscape, nothing but desert and big, red rocks. He said, “I’m not staying here. Turn around. We’re going home.”
My heart sank, but I should have known this would happen. There was no way I was ever going to get away from him. We turned around, and the same horrible abuse continued all the way home. He was furious at the psychic who sent him out to “the middle of nowhere,” and he took it out on me by smacking me around and making me sleep in the car for the night.
He woke me up, midmorning, to load the car and start driving home. We were only making a snail’s pace, on the drive back. He was already drinking and I didn’t have much strength left. We only traveled for about six hours because he was out of cigarettes and vodka, so we stopped for the night. I was in so much agony from the previous night’s beating that I accidentally screamed in pain while he sexually assaulted me again. I knew better than to do that, from a lifetime of experience—it only fueled his aggression so he was rougher than usual.
The next night he brought some rope from the trailer into the room and tied me down. I don’t know why—I couldn’t have possibly tried to get away or even move, for that matter. I was constantly reminded that I was no longer a person—I was just a thing to do what he wanted with. This went on for more hours than I can recall, but because of my treatment the night before, I was certain to make no noise.
That next morning, he untied me and told me to get cleaned up and hurry to the car. I was in pain, looked a mess, and was emotionally empty. We began driving and I was told there was only enough money for gas, cigarettes, and vodka. We had no more motel money and I was going to have to drive the rest of the way home with no sleep. I was exhausted yet so very relieved. For this day, the only physical abuse would be him smacking me in the head from the backseat.
Mom knew we had turned around because he called her to send money but she said, “Tough shit, I’m not sending you any more money. You’ve got enough for gas.” So I drove from Texas to my mother’s driveway in Florida without sleeping, almost twenty-four hours.
We arrived at the house at about 6:00 in the morning. I had bruises everywhere. I looked at my mother and said, “I’m going to bed. I don’t want to talk to anybody.” It was a Saturday. I went to my bedroom and slept for ten hours. When I got up, I heard him taunting my mother, saying, “I taught her how to be a real woman.” He said that I was finally grown up and good enough to please a man. I had to fight to keep from throwing up. He made it clear to my mom that from then on I would be his sex slave and there was nothing she could do about it. This changed the dynamics of the house. He was in my room nightly for several months. And we never went back to Cassadaga.
Just thinking about this trip makes me clutch my chest with anxiety pains. It’s probably one of my most horrible memories. It’s only one of the many reasons why none of us reported that asshole missing, and why I don’t blame whoever it was—Rickie or my mom—for shooting that son of a bitch in the back of the head, whether he was asleep at the time or not. As they say in some parts of the country, “He needed killing.”
CHAPTER 17
The Wedding Present
It was shortly after this trip that I began having medical problems and Cheryl took me to a doctor. I was having extremely painful, heavy periods and she thought maybe I had cancer. I tried to tell her “never mind.” I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of some strange man poking around down there, even if he was a doctor, and I really just didn’t want to know. But she insisted and finally convinced me that I should go and make sure that she was wrong. The doctor said I probably had several cysts, and then after further examination, he discovered that I don’t have much left of my uterus anymore. My father went into me with screwdrivers, and pretty much any tool he could get. Knives, when I was young. We didn’t go to doctors. We didn’t go to hospitals. We just recovered at home.
The doctor asked, “What happened to you?” I curtly answered, “I’ve been raped.” No big deal, whatever, you’re a male doctor, I ain’t going to tell you shit, is how I reacted inside. He told me, “Well, you’re never going to carry a child.” I should have turned my father in right then, but was too afraid. Even today I kick myself for being so pathetic and chicken. I was no better than my mother, too afraid to do anything.
I honestly believe she kept herself in check until we all graduated. Once I, the last kid, graduated she got antagonistic. She’d grab his pistol and wave it around the house, yelling and carrying on, “You think I can’t kill you? You think I won’t?” and he’d sit there and laugh. He thought it was hysterical. She’d grab a cigarette—I never knew my mother to smoke—and then she’d pour a drink and say, “I can get drunk like you,” and wave the pistol around.
She never got repercussions for it. I found that very odd. I guess he got a kick out of it, because he would chuckle. That was the only time I ever saw him laugh, when she was doing that, like he was kind of goading her on, to see if she had the guts to do anything. Who knows? Maybe he was hoping she’d do it.
Meantime, I got a job at McDonald’s and I was pretty good at it. In fact, I opened a restaurant for them at the age of nineteen. When I left them, it was because I had a falling out with the supervisor. Well, it was that and the fact that I was becoming a pretty heavy drinker. My father taught me to drink vodka at a very young age and it just became a way of life. When he would invite me to sit down and have a drink with him, I knew what was coming. It meant that it was my turn that night.
I went to work drunk. I would take a bottle with me and put it in the ice machine and drink out of it all evening long. My teenage staff loved me because we could party. We got our work done, and they watched my back. When supervisors would come in to check on us, they would make sure they buried my vodka, if I didn’t catch it in time. They knew if they buried my booze we’d go out for pizza, on me, as long as they didn’t turn me in for drinking while I was working. I had the cleanest restaurants, and I had the best reports from my customers. And I was shitfaced drunk.
Cheryl eventually got engaged, and when we could, Mom and I would meet her for lunch to help plan her wedding. We sneaked around for weeks trying on dresses. This was one secret that Mom managed to keep from him. I was to be the maid of honor and
, in her heart, Cheryl wanted our grandfather—Mom’s dad—to walk her down the aisle. This was her one impossible wish. We all knew there was no way it could happen, not without endangering his life.
It was around this time that the happy couple bought a house and no one told my father. One evening, my brother was at my parents’ house—he was invited over every so often by my father, and that was the only time he was allowed to visit. He threw me under the bus and told our father where Cheryl was living. When I got home, my father laughed his wicked laugh and asked, “Where does your sister live?” Rickie said, “Don’t bother lying. I already told him about the house.”
After the vicious beating that ensued for both me and Mom when she got home, I went to my bedroom and called Cheryl to tell her that the jig was up—he knew where she lived. She knew then to do whatever she could to stay safe. I was afraid for everyone at that point, because her safe haven was exposed. It became even more important to keep the wedding a secret.
A few months later it was September 1988 and the wedding was scheduled for Saturday, September 24. Cheryl still wanted my grandfather to walk her down the aisle. Somewhere around September 11, my father disappeared. I know, now, that he was shot in the back of the head, possibly while he slept. I’ll never know for sure by whom or exactly why.
I don’t know where I was when he “left,” but I was probably at work. I came home and my mother said he left. No big deal, he’d done it before. I thought, “Good, we can have a wedding without a disaster on our hands.” That’s what everybody thought.
Cheryl said, when she was interviewed by police after Mom disappeared, that Rickie called her about two weeks before she got married and said, “Have a good wedding. It’s taken care of; he won’t be there to bother you. Don’t worry about it. He’s gone.” We didn’t ask any questions after that. She called Mom and asked, “Is it true? Is he really not there?” Mom said, “No, he’s not here.” She wasn’t jubilant or sorrowful, just matter-of-fact.
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