Gary took me into his bedroom where I started undressing. He handed me my $50 and I noticed as I was getting on the bed that it was angled so that my head pointed downwards. He explained he had a lung problem and it helped him while he slept. He waited till I was lying on the bed then he pulled off his jeans and shorts but kept his lumberjack shirt on, before climbing on top of me.
Without saying a word he put himself inside me and started pumping away rhythmically. He didn’t say a word, just pounded on top of me with quickening thrusts until he was through. To me, this was business as usual. The quicker the better as far as I was concerned.
I got up to put my clothes on and it was then, just as I was about to step into my knickers, that I felt his arm come around my throat from behind, choking me.
Oh my God!
I wanted to scream but I couldn’t, I couldn’t even breathe. He was choking the air out of me and there was nothing that could pass through into my lungs.
I started to panic. Images from my life whipped through my mind, spinning and flipping past my eyes, giving me one last brief glimpse at the life I was about to leave behind. My mom, my children, the men I’d loved and lost…
It felt like I was going to pass out but I was afraid that if I lost consciousness, I’d never regain it. So I was struggling and bucking under him.
Suddenly, I felt him relax his grip a little and I gasped for breath.
He pulled one of my arms behind me and I heard a click as he attached a handcuff to my wrist. I started wriggling again, desperately trying to twist my body to get away from him. Whatever he had in mind, this couldn’t be good.
‘Stop struggling or I’m going to choke you again,’ he said gruffly. ‘Just put your other arm behind your back.’
He tone was calm, matter-of-fact – there wasn’t any anger or annoyance in his voice at all. It was as if he was giving me instructions on how to boil a kettle. That tone of voice was even more chilling to me. What was this all about? A million nightmare scenarios ran through my head.
He had my arm in a tight grip and I knew he wasn’t messing around so I put my other hand behind my back and he cuffed that hand.
Naked and handcuffed, I was led downstairs into the living room, through to the dining room and over to a door that led down some steps into his basement.
No man had ever been physically violent with me before. I’d never experienced anything like this. I was frightened. Very frightened.
Gary clamped my arms tightly behind me and pushed me roughly down the steps. The glare of a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling illuminated a stark, sparse room. There was a large freezer down there, a radio blaring out music, another pinball machine and in the midst of all this normality, I saw that he’d dug a hole in the ground.
When I saw the hole, my heart starting thumping even harder and my body became rigid with fear. What was this hole for? Was he going to kill me? Was this my grave?
I was in complete shock, terrified, cold, gasping for breath and praying these weren’t my last seconds on earth.
As I stood there, Gary started to put on these muffler clamps round my ankles. They looked like the kind of clamps that are used to attach the exhaust pipe to the bottom of the car – one straight side attached to a half circle.
He screwed the clamps on tight then he applied Krazy Glue on the screws and tightened them up again. He was working methodically, diligently, and it seemed as if he knew exactly what he was doing. There was nothing panicked or rushed about his movements. Finally he took out a hairdryer and dried the glue with the dryer.
It was bizarre, seeing this ordinary-looking appliance being used in such a sick, twisted way.
I was standing there, naked, my hands cuffed behind me, in complete shock.
Eventually when he finished his work, he attached the clamps to a long chain that he clamped to a sewer pipe along the wall of the basement with a padlock.
Finally he undid my cuffs and pushed me into the hole.
The hole was too small for my five-foot-six-inch frame and I didn’t fit. So he kept pushing my head down. At some point my wig must have fallen off because he was pushing hard down onto my ponytail. I was squashed against the bare, cold earth and my legs were folded up so that my chin was resting on my knees, one arm curled around my head while the other was locked to my side. I was screaming with agony and protest but Gary just carried on as if nothing in the world could stop him. He didn’t even bother to tell me to shut up. The radio was so loud it completely drowned out my shouts.
Once I was in the hole Gary pulled a heavy board over the top. I watched with horror as he pushed the board slowly across the hole, inch by inch until suddenly I was in complete darkness, alone and more frightened than I ever had been in my life.
I smelled the dense, earthy soil around me and tried my best to wriggle my body so that I wasn’t squashed so awkwardly but Gary must have put something heavy on top of the board to weigh it down because, as hard as I tried to push against it, it was clamped tight, like a lid.
The next thing I heard was the heavy sound of footsteps on the wooden steps that led from the basement to the ground floor. He was going back upstairs. He was leaving me here. I was overwhelmed by panic. What if he was going to leave me here to rot? What if he left me here forever? What if the air ran out?
I started to cry and whimper, petrified.
Oh God. Oh God – what’s happening to me?
I had to get out. I had to!
I started yelling: ‘Let me out! Let me out! Help! Get me out of here! Somebody call the cops. I’m being kept prisoner!’
I yelled and yelled and yelled for hours. But nothing happened, no one came and there I was, stuck in that same twisted position the whole time, screaming and hollering for my life. My arm went numb after a while and the cold earth chilled me to the very bone.
Occasionally I stopped to listen for a sign that someone could hear me but in those moments I felt the terror grip me and I’d start to sob again. So I’d start shouting again. It was all I could think to do.
Chapter Two
The Hole
Music. I could hear music.
I heard it coming from far away and recognized the song – it was Anita Baker’s ‘Caught up in the Rapture’. They’d been playing this same song on the radio on and off for hours.
My arms and legs were so stiff I could barely feel them; all I could feel was the coldness of my skin against the damp, gritty earth.
My mind was foggy – where was I?
I’d woken up in a world I didn’t recognize – my limbs were curled awkwardly around my body, darkness was everywhere and the bitter, iron taste of blood was in my parched mouth.
The ground had enclosed me completely – it was underneath me, around me, on every side and the smell was like the ground after it rained, just closer. Much closer.
I could feel my cheeks were damp – had I been crying in my sleep? I couldn’t tell. Maybe something was trickling from my eye – it felt sore.
I blinked myself awake and tried to focus on my surroundings but my vision refused to cooperate. There was no light, just darkness.
I had been buried alive.
* * *
Today was Thanksgiving. I knew that because I heard the radio announcers cheerily report that it was 6 a.m., then 7 a.m., and 8 a.m. And so on until it was now 9 p.m. I’d been down here for twenty-four hours already – a whole day had passed since Gary led me down here in handcuffs.
How on earth did I end up in this godforsaken place, not knowing whether I would live from one moment to the next?
I should be at home. Why was I here?
I thought of my mom, Florence Patterson – she’d be expecting me to call today. If I didn’t call, she’d worry, like any mother would.
Florence wasn’t my birth mother but she was my mom in every other sense. She’d taken me in after my birth parents left me and my older brother and sister in an apartment to die.
They just walked out a
nd left us when I was six weeks old.
We were only rescued because the neighbors heard me crying and called the police. If they hadn’t alerted the police, nobody would have found us.
When the police knocked down the door they found me, my two-year-old sister Iris and my one-year-old brother Freddy in a pitiful state – freezing, cold and hungry.
Afterwards, when the police tried to trace my parents, the neighbors said they hadn’t seen them in a real long while. Who knew how long we were there? Or how many times we’d been left like that.
We were placed in temporary foster homes before I went to live with my beautiful mom and dad when I was four months old. And that’s where I stayed until my early twenties.
Down in the hole, I started weeping. Mom! Will I see my mom again?
I loved my mom so much I never wanted to be apart from her. By the time I arrived in their home, Florence and Augustus had already brought up eight of their own kids so me and my other foster sister Althea were spoiled rotten. Thanks to a wealth of hand-me-downs we got everything we could ever want and more – toys, clothes, trips and treats.
We had a living room that stretched out for one whole floor of the house, and it was stacked full of toys. And I’d be having a temper tantrum looking for a missing toy when most kids my age would be happy with just one of the toys I had!
Mom and I didn’t look anything alike: she was short and black while my birth mother was Mexican and my birth father was Puerto Rican. Back then child protective services didn’t bother with us being the same color as our fostering family. The important thing was getting in a loving home and in that regard I was blessed.
Mom was heavy but she wasn’t fat. She had her hair done in curls most days, wore glasses and always made herself look nice. Most of all, she was very mannerly and polite and didn’t put up with no nonsense from me! Having brought up eight kids before I was even born, she knew her way around child-rearing.
The only thing she wasn’t prepared for was how sick I was as a child. Thanks to my bad start in life, I had pneumonia as a baby and it was really serious.
At just a few months old my fever got so high so that I had to be taken to the hospital.
It was tough for Mom – a couple of times they called her in, saying I wasn’t going to last the night, but somehow, somehow I always pulled through.
‘You’re a little fighter!’ my mom would laugh as I got older.
The pneumonia would continue to plague me throughout my childhood, until eventually the hospital stopped admitting me and just gave my mom the medicine to administer at home.
Mom was always ready with a comforting bowl of soup as I lay in bed, huddled under the covers as the fever seared through my body.
Even today I suffer from asthma, respiratory weakness and whole host of allergies.
We grew up in a good area of Philly called the Museum District, and my parents were God-fearing folk so we always went to mass every single morning. As a young kid, I’d be so bored I couldn’t sit still. I’d be crawling up and around the pews, making trouble and generally misbehaving.
And every single morning, after getting back from church, Mom would give me a whooping for my bad behavior.
Yeah, Mom was strict – she made sure we all could read and write before we started school and we all knew how to cook and clean and wash after ourselves even though she did it for us most of the time. We had chores, like making our beds, and after meals, my sister would wash up and I’d dry. There wasn’t a lot of time to be sitting around, doing nothing.
In the whole time I was at home I only said I was bored once, and on that occasion my mom quickly replied: ‘Oh really? You bored? Well, that’s good because I got a lot of things you can be getting on with like scrubbing this floor to start with!’
I looked at the huge kitchen floor and set to work getting it all clean. Once I thought I had it looking nice I called her back in, all swollen up with pride. But Mom had high standards and she didn’t settle for anything less.
‘Well!’ she exclaimed, a steely glint in her eye, ‘now you got the dirt all spread around evenly, you can start cleaning it up!’
I was cleaning the damn floor for hours that day!
Back in the hole, I sobbed as I remembered Mom’s love for me, and how she had always wanted to do the best thing by me.
One day when I was three years old my birth father turned up.
It must have all been arranged because when I got up that morning, Mom said: ‘You’re going to have a visitor today. What do you want to wear?’
I picked out my favorite dress – a red one with white lace trim.
Mom put the dress on me and did my hair all nice.
It wasn’t long before a strange-looking man turned up. He sat on the couch, my mom sat in a chair facing him and I stood at her shoulder, leaning into her, too shy to speak or even look at this guy.
‘Why don’t you talk to him?’ Mom kept saying. ‘That’s your dad.’
I shook my head. Who was this man? He wasn’t my dad. He was nothing to do with me. I just wanted him to go away so we could go back to being normal and playing.
Eventually, after exhausting himself trying to get me to say something, that strange-looking man turned to my mom. ‘This girl needs to get her butt whipped because she doesn’t listen to anything anybody says.’
Mom pursed her lips and with a gentle turn of her head, said: ‘Well, it won’t get done here.’
He left not long after that and Mom took me into the kitchen and stood me on a chair so she could take my nice dress off and put me into my play clothes.
As she pulled the pretty red dress up over my head I found my voice again: ‘I love you, Mommy!’
She looked at me with exasperation in her eyes, but said nothing.
Then: ‘You know, you have another mommy out there somewhere.’
‘No I don’t. I love you.’
‘I love you too. Now go outside and play.’
After that my dad returned to see me one more time but I had mumps so he couldn’t come in my room. Later, in our teens, me and my real sister Iris would seek out my father in an effort to trace our birth mother.
Mom didn’t hide the fact that I was fostered – she wanted me to know the truth so I would be prepared one day in case my parents wanted me back in their lives.
That was Mom – she didn’t sugar-coat a thing. She was direct, to the point, said what needed to be said and then moved on. There wasn’t any tiptoeing around with her. She always said what she thought.
But even she would be lost for words, I thought to myself, with what was happening to me now. I knew she would be upset that I hadn’t called her on Thanksgiving, and that knowledge, that I was making her feel bad, made me sob even harder.
Because we came from Catholic child protective services and because my foster parents were God-fearing, I was sent to the local Catholic school, a fee-paying school.
It was the first time that St Francis Xavier’s at 24th and Green was accepting blacks and Hispanics so I stood out like a sore thumb.
That first year was hard for me – I was used to being with my mom the whole time and wherever she was, that was the only place I ever wanted to be.
I’d put my hand up in class and ask to go to the bathroom then I’d walk home and ring the doorbell, fully expecting my mom to be happy I’d managed to navigate the long route back by myself.
‘What are you doing here?’ she’d scream, as I stood smiling on the porch.
‘Momma, you miss me!’ I’d insist. ‘You need me to be home with you.’
It took me a little time to realize that every time I walked out of school and went back home, Mom took me straight back again, with a warning of a whooping if I pulled a stunt like that again.
The school was big – hundreds of pupils – yet there were only six black and Hispanic kids in the whole place. To this day I can still remember every single one of their names.
The white kids were suspicious at fir
st and they didn’t understand my racial background at all.
‘You a black girl,’ they’d tell me.
‘Uh-uh,’ I’d say, shaking my head. ‘I’m Spanish – my birth mom is Mexican and my birth dad is Puerto Rican.’
‘But your parents are black. I seen them!’
‘Those are my foster parents,’ I’d say wearily. I can’t remember how many times I had to go through that whole routine.
‘Well, whatever. Your mom is black and that makes you a nigger!’ they’d jeer.
I’d want to punch their smug little faces – I think that’s what they were trying to get me to do. But I’d always hold back. I didn’t want to get into trouble. But I’d go home at nights, depressed, and report this new unhappy aspect of life to my mom.
She didn’t have any time for my self-pity. ‘This is just a part of life,’ she’d say seriously. ‘You gonna face this the whole of your life so if you don’t get used to it now and change your way of thinking, you ain’t never gonna get on.
‘Don’t feed into everything that everybody says, just because people are saying stuff. It don’t matter what anybody else thinks or says. You are at school for one reason and one reason only – to get an education. That’s your priority. You ignore the rest.
‘And then, if you do need to fight, you get on the ground and you do this and that and get it over with.’
I giggled as Mom socked a punch to an imaginary opponent, but she wasn’t joking around.
She looked at me hard. ‘Josefina, suck it up! And if you can’t do that, you fight and get it over with and move on. Got it?’
I nodded vigorously.
She thought I had to toughen up. And so I did. I got into a couple of fights, nothing serious, and within the first year I’d more or less learned how to stick up for myself.
If I ever whined or moaned about the girls in school, as all girls did, Mom would give me a severe talking-to. She didn’t care what people said – as long as I got good grades.
‘Why are you sitting round worrying about what everybody is saying when this is a C on your paper? It takes you three hours at night to do your homework because you’re so worried about what everyone’s saying. You need to adapt to the part of the program that you’re there for, which is to get an education.’
Cellar Girl Page 2