by Bobi Conn
On the other hand, before we were married, we were always allowed to spend the night at my father’s house and sleep in the same room—sometimes on the floor, sometimes in the bed, according to my father’s whims. He told me, You better not be having sex in there, and I said, Oh no, of course not. And he gave us weed sometimes, let us smoke our own anytime. Once, he went clambering up one of the hills near the house, searching for a pot plant that he had neglected for a while. He brought it back to us, all purple-green and strong smelling, but lacking any real substance, once you got down to it.
One night, my father beckoned us out of the camper. He needed my husband to go somewhere with him, he said. They would be back soon, he said. I was grouchy. I do not remember any particular frustration, other than the fact that my dad was taking my companion away to go on some dubious mission, and neither my husband nor I seemed able to deny my father. So they left, and I sat in his house while his new wife and children slept—he hadn’t stayed single for long after his previous girlfriend moved out and finally broke it off for good. As the hours passed, I grew more and more irritated. I knew I couldn’t express any anger toward my father, so when they finally returned, I tried to blame my husband for staying out so late.
He didn’t want to talk until we returned to our camper. When we got there, he told me where they had gone—to a friend of my father’s. That friend had light-blue eyes and made knives as a hobby. He had a little workshop filled with handles and blades that he fitted and sharpened to sell or trade. At least, that’s what my father told me. I was always left to sit in the cab of his truck while my father went into the workshop. There could have been anything in there.
Earlier in the year, before we moved into the camper, a college student with a funny nickname, who came to our house a lot, had mentioned the mushroom mines in Carter County. In the 1920s and ’30s, a 186-acre mountain was turned into an underground limestone mine, with 2.6 million square feet of tunnels honeycombed deep into the rock. From the mid-’50s to the late ’70s or early ’80s, a commercial mushroom business began operations, went under, tried again, and finally closed.
In 1995, before James and I married, my father told me that his friend the knife maker owned the mines. He urged me to go there with James and Junior, so we could camp while my dad’s friend slept in the cab of his semi, which was parked just inside the mines. The entrance to the mines was littered with broken bottles, and the walls were covered in graffiti. A few years later, a young man and his girlfriend killed his parents and brought their bodies there. There were stories of satanic rituals, occult worship, drug deals, and ghosts in the mines—but we did not know that yet.
Why my dad had encouraged us to go there, I did not know. The entrance was framed with thick walls, and some sort of metal skeleton of a roof loomed above us. It was a chilly day, but the sun glinted off the shards of glass that lay everywhere. My brother and boyfriend walked around, exploring the outside of the cave. I stood in the abandoned entrance, wondering why my dad’s friend always looked into my eyes so deeply, why he always smiled at me, why it felt like he knew a secret about me.
The cave was fairly warm, and we slept close to the entrance. Still, the stagnant air made us sick, and in the morning, I woke up feeling suffocated. A year later, when the college boy with a funny nickname mentioned the mines, he told us he had heard that someone burned the semi cab that was in there. We mentioned that to my father, and he and his friend wanted to know who did it.
So when my father took my young husband to his friend’s house, it was because he and his friend wanted to question him. They took him into the workshop and showed him the knives, asking him questions about our acquaintance and the story we had heard. Finally, one of those two middle-aged men said he would love to get ahold of whoever had burned that semi—Wouldn’t you love to get ahold of him?—with one of those sharp knives in hand. He held the knife to my husband’s throat—Just like this. Feel how sharp that is? It would cut right through somebody.
And after my husband stood there with a knife held to his throat by two crazy, drugged men and somehow convinced my father and his friend he could be of no further use to them, after he told me what had happened and how those men did not believe that we did not have the information they wanted, that he did not have the information they wanted, and after he said he couldn’t live next to my dad’s house anymore, we packed our few belongings and drove off in the middle of the night.
I don’t know what people thought when I went back to high school for my senior year, married and clearly high most of the time. Even when I was there, I wasn’t there. It was the perfect ending to all those years of feeling completely, painfully alienated from my peers. If it takes a village to raise a child, I was the warning sign that our village had failed, or that there was no village after all.
I didn’t talk to James about how I felt, and how I suspected he felt, regarding our attempt at a relationship. I had learned to listen and be quiet, to not make any noise. I never responded to people who were cruel or condescending, but I wrote words down. My voice became adept at self-protection, as I said one thing and meant another, as I remained silent and thought everything. My silence had at once kept me safe and made me vulnerable in childhood. That silence was a large part of my self-sabotage as an adult.
So many people who endure poverty as children end up making unhealthy choices or accepting their lots. Those around us don’t realize that some of us never feel like we have a choice, never know we have a voice or a right to speak. Some children are taught they deserve and have such power, but for those of us who weren’t given the privilege of that knowledge, we go on doing the things we saw adults around us do, we subconsciously choose the lives that were modeled for us. For most of us, there is no flash of understanding when we turn eighteen, no sudden self-awareness that transforms our child selves into responsible, world-savvy adults. We fight the demons that embedded themselves into the fabric of our consciousness, not knowing why we always feel like we’re in a fight. We walk through the world as if we are part of it, but our anguish constantly reminds us that the world neither loves nor wants things that are broken.
CHAPTER 18
Holding On
In the spring of my senior year, James and I went to a music festival in Berea, the home of a college my art teacher had recommended I attend, and we decided we would move there after I graduated high school. A lot of the people around us were tripping on acid at the festival, though I was sober at the time. It took place in the forest that I didn’t yet know belonged to the college. There was a Grateful Dead cover band, and young college students gave talks about being vegan and saving the world by recycling.
I fell in love with this new forest, which looked like the one I had grown up in. But instead of men like my father and the darkness that seemed to grow around him, the young men wore tie-dyes and played instruments or danced without fear. Young women stood onstage at the amphitheater and made impassioned speeches. I thought it was the perfect place for me—the best of where I had come from, with plenty of room for a culture I believed in.
We went back a couple of weeks later and found an apartment for rent and put our deposit down with the money I had received as graduation gifts. One day, my mother gave me a message that I needed to contact the college—they had called her phone since I didn’t have one. I reached them from a pay phone, and they said they had six spots left and one of them was mine if I wanted it. They asked whether I was serious about coming there. Standing in the Save-A-Lot parking lot, I told the admissions officer yes, I was moving there next week, one way or another.
When we got there, James spent a bit of time submitting applications and working here and there. For a while, he worked at a factory, putting in long hours. We hardly had any food or money. I cooked soups and spread the ingredients as far as I could, sometimes eating one meal a day, figuring that since my husband was working, he needed to eat more than I did—I was always giving away what I needed. I spent a
lot of time reading, going to the library and picking out anything I could find to stave off the boredom and loneliness while he was gone. At that time, I had never been alone for very long and was afraid of what being by myself meant. I probably feared I would be left alone forever, and in my mind, losing the possibility of being loved by a man had to be worse than all the suffering that comes with a relationship not truly defined by love.
After a few weeks, he came home early one night, and my immediate happiness to see him quickly gave way to dread. He had walked out of the factory over something his supervisor said, and that was the end of that job.
Soon, I started working in a Laundromat. The old man who ran it showed me around and put me to work cleaning the machines, sweeping, mopping, and doing laundry. I would call James during my lunch break, and sometimes he was home, sometimes not. The old man liked to sit in a plastic chair between the rows of washing machines and watch me while I mopped, and soon I decided I could no longer take that for just over five dollars an hour.
I called the college and asked whether there was any way I could work for them. Since I hadn’t officially begun my first semester, I wasn’t considered a student yet and wasn’t eligible to work as such. Someone pulled some strings, though, and soon I was on the housekeeping crew at the college. It was long, hot work. Once, we cleaned out maggot-infested trash that had sat in an empty dorm kitchen for months, but I had people my age to talk to, and a steady paycheck.
One day, I came home and James said he hoped I didn’t mind, but he had run into some traveling hippies in town, and they asked for spare change. The alarm on my face must have been clear, because he reassured me he didn’t give them any change but instead had invited them to eat a homemade vegan dinner with us. We had no money to spare and often dug around for loose change to buy gas—once, I bought thirty-seven cents’ worth at the gas station down the street from us. But I felt comfortable with feeding people, and I was sure we could do something kind through food.
A black guy and a white girl showed up at our apartment that night—they were probably my age or close to it. They were traveling with a Rainbow tribe—young, wandering hippies—and they stayed with us for a few weeks, and then the young man ended up staying with us for several months at different times over the next couple of years. He was a lanky thing, over six feet tall, and his body was so stiff, he couldn’t get cross-legged when he sat on the floor. Sit on my floor he did, though, and it seemed like he took up most of the room when he sat there beating on a drum, often while I was trying to read Plato or Aristotle for my freshman philosophy class.
During my senior year of high school, I had tried to teach myself yoga from a book, but I have never been good at learning physical skills by reading about them. I gave that yoga book to the young hippie, hoping he would gain enough flexibility so he could cross his legs. He started doing yoga from the book and became interested in Eastern philosophies, meditation, Buddhism, and so forth, to the point where he soon went to the same college I was attending and then moved to India to teach English and study Buddhism and Buddhist dialectics.
My freshman year of college was, in some ways, an extension of high school, though I was thrilled to find that I could reinvent myself and that no one knew me from before. No one I met had ever known me to cry or be humiliated by my peers, and there were far more liberal, hippie types at the college than there had been in high school. I almost felt like I belonged.
After the philosophy class I took as an elective my first semester, I felt my mind changing, expanding as I struggled with the logic exercises and analytical reading. I loved it. I would go to my professor’s office and ask him questions after class, which he urged me to ask during class, but I was too self-conscious, at least at first.
I also took a course on argumentation and debate, and James started complaining that I liked to argue too much because of it, and picked apart every little discussion. I almost felt bad about it, but he spent most of his days playing guitar and smoking weed with my college friends, so I think it evened out, our ways of frustrating one another.
During the spring leading up to the first break in our marriage, I worked at a Denny’s, waitressing in the small college town with the women and young girls who were not college students, not vegetarians or vegans, and who tried to convince me to let them put makeup on me and fix my hair. James protested me getting a job at first, not because I was also a full-time student or because the college required me to work ten hours on campus as well, but because he said I would complain about him not working. Desperate to pay our bills, I assured him I would not complain, and I didn’t.
While I was working or doing homework one night, James went to a party at a friend’s house and came home with crystal meth. He had tried it in the bathroom at our friend’s house and thought I would like it, he explained. By the time summer began, I was snorting crystal meth almost daily, and I somehow became a relatively successful waitress, making more in tips than any of the other women, but my body rebelled constantly, hardly able to take in food. When I did try to eat, my body reminded me it did not want any food at that time. By the end of the school year, my professors had started telling me I wasn’t looking well.
There was a guy at work, though, who thought I looked well enough to flirt with. He was cute and had a great smile, though he was a lazy waiter. He talked to me a lot, and outside one night, during a smoke break, he told me his girlfriend didn’t mind him being with other people. He pulled me to him at some point, and it was more than I could stand. I told James that night, lying in bed, that I wanted to have an open relationship. He didn’t say much. I asked him whether he wanted to talk about it, and he said no, he would say something he regretted. So we didn’t talk about it.
A few days later, I made my way to the party house affectionately known as the crack house, where this coworker was hanging out with some of my sort-of friends. The cute, young flirt had actually gotten fired or quit his job, so I had gone out of my way to stop by the crack house a couple of times, hoping to see him there. When I finally did, there was no fire, no spark. I knew right away that my excitement over being flirted with, being wanted by such an attractive guy, was indeed not going to have any long-term benefit. I felt dirty and ashamed before we even started. After a few minutes of chatter around the other friends, he led me into someone’s bedroom and sat me on the edge of the bed, where I waited for him to do what he wanted and be done. It was only then that I wondered about his girlfriend and realized I had most likely fallen for a trick, and I probably wasn’t the only one.
The worst part was knowing I had gone out of my way to see him. I never went to that house to party, and it had a feeling about it that made me uncomfortable, like the darkness I had left behind in Morehead. That boy knew how to use his smile to make a girl feel special, and as I followed him into the bedroom, I tried to ignore the dawning realization that I was anything but special. My shame at wanting to feel pretty and wanted and worthy of his lovely face and lovely smile was endlessly multiplied as I saw the truth of myself, how I had come to him like a starved animal. A married woman pretending this fit into my relationship or my own map of desire. Knowing it was a lie that his girlfriend was okay with this. Having my friends-acquaintances watch me walk into the bedroom, come back out, and leave shortly thereafter because I had no other reason to be there. Because I wanted that scrap of affection, there was no lie that was too big to tell myself. And though I forgot his name not too long after that happened, I still can’t forget any other detail.
CHAPTER 19
Letting Go
My college classes, though, were incredible. The college itself was the first interracial college in the South, as well as the first to educate men and women together. The most important aspect of it for me was that it was completely free, and I could therefore afford it without going into debt—a rarity I didn’t appreciate at the time. But I also didn’t understand then that I could have gotten scholarships and taken out loans to attend o
ther schools. When I took the ACT test, the paper forms we filled out already had Morehead State University listed as a college that would receive our scores. I added Berea College to that list because of what my art teacher had said. Despite my constant defiance of teachers and school rules, I was still listening.
I went to college because I wasn’t sure what else I could do. I didn’t have sense enough to understand what college meant or to understand student loans and terms. I knew that the little college town had people who seemed like me—they liked to take LSD and kick a Hacky Sack and listen to the Grateful Dead. College seemed a safe way forward as I moved toward an uncertain future. There had been so many times I wanted to die, to finally be done with the difficulty of surviving. But dying never seemed to be an option. Maybe I never lost my childhood fear that if I couldn’t figure out how to survive my life, someone else would have to be me. School was the only thing that had come easy for me growing up, which set me apart from the majority of people who grew up as I did. Unlike them, when I didn’t know what to do with myself, my ability and desire to perform well at school could easily serve me. It was probably the only aspect of my unconscious thinking that did so.
I had signed up for a philosophy class as an elective but thought I would be an English major. I found myself surrounded by people who knew words I did not know, which I wrote down and looked up in a dictionary after class, so I would never be in the dark about that particular word again. My professors didn’t mind my questions, and I never ran out of them. Finally, I felt free to ask questions, to argue, to say what I thought. Finally, I was allowed to have a voice.
I ended up with what I thought was a large group of friends. For the first time, a lot of people knew me and seemed to like me. I had a best friend who looked similar to me—long hair, unshaved, and we were both vegan by that time. Many of my friends were hippies and looked it, to varying degrees. I smoked weed, but I usually just did that when I was also going to take psychedelics—otherwise, by the time I was eighteen, smoking weed brought that familiar anxiety rushing back. I drank a little more than I had before—though not much, still. My best friend didn’t mind doing just about anything, like me. When I offered her crystal meth, she snorted it with me, though I was the one who always went just a little too far, who wanted more than anyone around me wanted, whether it was LSD or meth or the conversations my professors offered, which I sought at every turn. All that childhood hunger had left me insatiable.