The Road Through Wonderland: Surviving John Holmes

by Dawn Schiller

“I, uh, really hope this isn’t too personal but, uh, I would really appreciate it if I could just, uh, touch your butt.”

  “What? My butt?”

  “Uh, yeah. I, uh, just got this thing for butts, and I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Well, uh, I guess so,” I answer, quietly praying that’s all he’ll want. I hope he won’t turn mean. Very lightly and cautiously, he places his hand on my rear end and then quickly pulls it off as if it’s fire, too hot. He giggles to himself and mutters a thank you, crawling under his covers, a grin plastered across his face.

  “Wait till I tell old Bill here what he missed. He’s not going to believe it. Ha! Good night.” There is a pause. “By the way, what’s your name again?”

  “My name?” I hesitate. “My name…is Dawn.” I feel a small sense of pride stir deep down inside me, in a place that has been hollow for so long.

  “Dawn, huh? Good night, Dawn.”

  I’m relieved. It sounds like he will just go to sleep. Tomorrow I will be free. I will be out of this terrible place. “Good night.” I crawl under my blankets, happy for this polished antiseptic floor, into a grateful sleep.

  Morning arrives, and I am the talk of the senior home. Sam sneaks me down to the main lobby, telling the front clerk I am his guest who’s just arrived and needs to call the bus station. The clerk nods and hands me the phone book.

  “Greyhound, Glendale.” The voice on the other end of the phone is young and chipper.

  “Yes. Hello. My name is Dawn Schiller. Is there a ticket there for me? Did my mother call and leave one?”

  “Uh, let’s see…from an Edda Schiller in Oregon?”

  “Yes. Yes. That’s her! Is it there?” I hold my breath disbelieving that this is real, scared that he will tell me he made a mistake and there is nothing there.

  “Uh, yeah, uh, it’s here, but, uh, someone just called looking for you. Some guy. He said he was your boyfriend.”

  “Oh God! What did you tell him? You didn’t say anything, did you? He’s not going there, is he?” In my chest, the pounding sounds like thunder.

  “Well, uh, yeah. I told him. He said he’s on his way.”

  “Oh no! No! Don’t tell him anything! I ran away from him. He’s gonna kill me if he catches up to me. Please. Don’t tell him I called.”

  “Well. He said you had a fight; he wants to make up with you. He made me promise to not let you get on the bus.”

  “No! He’s lying! He just wants you to believe he’s a nice guy, but he’s lying. I ran away from him because he hurts me. Please, don’t tell him you talked to me!”

  The crackling, silent line tells me he is really listening, believing me. “Well, yeah. Okay. The guy did sound pretty crazy, and your mom has been calling too. What do I tell him when he gets here?”

  “My mom called? Tell him I already left. Tell him I never showed up. I don’t know—tell him anything!”

  “Yeah! Okay. When are you going to be here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m in San Fernando, and I have to find a bus that will go to Glendale. I don’t have any money, so I have to figure something out. I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, uh…” There is that silence again. “Well, maybe I can come and get you after I get off. Your mom asked me if I would help you. She told me you were running from your boyfriend. She’s got five dollars here for you too, for food. I get off in a couple hours. What’s your address?”

  The world around me seems to get lighter. Lighter than the colorless shroud that’s darkened everything in the past years. Thank you, Mom. A touch of hope is filtering in like the sun through a dirt-caked screen. I give him the address of the retirement home and hang up. Sam arranges for me to sit in the dining room with the other residents while they eat breakfast. The kitchen won’t serve me an extra plate. The residents will get in trouble, but that doesn’t stop them: Somehow my story gets around to them, and it isn’t long before extra pieces of toast and bacon wrapped in napkins and tin foil are smuggled to me under the tables.

  The hours pass quickly. I dwell on the thought that I am actually going to get away. This is gonna work this time, my senses forecast. An old, white delivery van pulls up in front of the home, and a young man in his late twenties sporting a ponytail gets out and asks me my name.

  “Dawn?”

  “Yeah. That’s me.” I wave good-bye and yell a thanks to Sam and his elderly gang of bandits.

  “He was just at the station. Your boyfriend.”

  “Who? John? What did you do?” I’m sweating now. I’m not out of here yet. Maybe I won’t get away.

  “I told him you just left a few minutes ago on another bus.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He asked which way it was going. Ha! I told him the opposite way, through Las Vegas.”

  “Thanks, man. Was he mad?”

  “No. Well, I couldn’t tell. He acted very concerned.”

  “He’s crazy.” We pull into the Glendale Greyhound bus station, and my bus is already boarding. “Thank you so much. Thank you. You saved my life. I can’t tell you how much you saved my life.”

  “Yeah. It’s cool. Your mom is real worried. Here’s the five dollars she sent for you and, uh, here.” He hands me an old long-sleeved, button-down shirt. “It’s cold in Oregon. Take care, and good luck.”

  “Thank you. Thanks a lot.”

  I board the long, silver bus and head for a window seat in the back. In my baggy jeans pocket is a piece of contraband toast, broken a little, the crumbs rubbed off. I lean against the cool glass, relaxed for the first time in so long, and bite down on the dry bread. Wow. This is the first time I have ever been away from John in years. It is a strange, queer feeling. Never having imagined that we would ever be apart, I make a mental note of my entire body. So this is how it feels. How it feels to be without him. So far, I am feeling okay—better than I have felt in a while. Still, I can’t deny the pain that lies deep beneath the numbness in my chest: the pain of the million bleeding pieces of my shattered heart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  One Last Wonderland, Baby!

  Lights flash in colored blasts around me. There is a whirlwind. I am in the eye of a tornado; the force from the surrounding current is spinning and sucking me down. A long, frayed rope hangs in the middle of the twirling black tunnel, and with bleeding hands I clutch it. It takes all my strength to not be pulled into the treacherous gale.

  “He’s bad news.” The clear, sharp voice of sanity speaks clearly through the raging blast of the storm around me.

  “But he’s all I know.” My defensive voice is frail, but audible through the noise.

  “He hurt you.”

  “But I’ve known him since I was fifteen. He taught me everything.”

  My fear grows louder. Suddenly, my arm slips from the life-saving rope, yanked into the whirling tornado.

  “My arm! I’m being sucked in!” I fight to wrench it free.

  In a desperate internal struggle, I force my eyes open, hurrying to escape the deadly abyss. Slowly, soaked in sweat, my body breaks free of the paralyzing nightmare.

  Mom is here—on her knees, next to me with my wrist in her hand, crying. “Mein Gott!” she whispers. “Look! You’re so skinny.”

  “Hi, Mom.” I can barely muster a half smile.

  “Vaht’s happened to you, Dawn? You’re so thin! I tought effrything vas good. Vas it drugs?” She wipes the tears from her cheeks as she stands to hover over my emaciated frame.

  I avoid her eyes, stare out of the big picture window behind her onto the winter-barren Blue Mountains on the eastern horizon, and nod.

  I can’t talk about it. Not to my mother. Anger is still buried deep, and it hurts too much to look into myself right now. Quick, short images of my life, a horror film, play in my head like shredded frames of a movie reel. John’s evil sneer as he ties me up and beats me mercilessly with a belt; my body crudely sold to strangers; being dragged by my hair on my hands and knees. Stop! I can’t do
this. I can’t.

  I stand up. “It was bad, Mom.” Not allowing emotion to raise my protective walls of silence, I walk into the kitchen. “Got anything to eat?”

  Berrrrring! Berrrrring!

  Thinking it’s my brother or sister calling about my arrival, I grab the phone that hangs off the cabinet above the stove. “Hello?”

  “Baby! Wait! Listen!”

  It takes only a second for the anger to reach my throat.“Fuck you!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

  Blam! I hang up.

  “How long has he been calling?” I snap, waves of rage causing my body to tremble.

  “Vell, you slept a long time. He’s been calling all morning. I…”

  “NOTHING! Tell him nothing about me. And tell him to go fuck himself if he calls again. I never want to hear his voice. Ever!” I am shaking hard now, and I want to throw up.

  “Dawn!” Mom’s eyes are full of shock and surprise at the intensity of my words. She can see her daughter has been hurt, but I am like a stranger to her, and she’s helpless.

  “You don’t understand, Mom! I can’t tell you how much…he…Never mind!” I lose my appetite. Memories stab sharp, tortured pain from my gut to my throat, and I need to lie down. I curl into a fetal position, the most heart-wrenching of sobs bellowing from the very bottom of my soul. Sorrowfully, like a Holocaust survivor, I weep.

  The month of January fades into February, and the phone continues to ring…two, three times a day. I stop picking it up for anyone, just in case it is John on the other line, and let it ring and ring. Morning, noon, and twice at night the phone rings. Only my family answers. In the beginning they hang up too, but soon enough John gets them to stay on the line and coaxes them into talking. “No. I’m sorry, but I don’t tink dat she vahnts to talk.” My mother stays polite while I signal for her to hang up.

  There is snow on the ground, ice—and the sky is solidly gray. Eastern Oregon is barren in the winter. Brown, creepy, lifeless sticks for plants and trees. Wind chill in the teens. It suits my mood and the way I feel about life. Mom’s in a new place, a light blue two-story house nearly a hundred years old. She is recently remarried and seems happy to finally have a place of her own. They are struggling though and don’t have much, so after a month of isolating myself I finally feel well enough to apply for a job and help out. I’m a CNA, I tell myself with pride, remembering a good part of my past. I can find a job.

  I secure a position at Evergreen Convalescent Hospital—not a difficult thing to do; they so desperately need the help for the elderly—and begin a three-to-eleven shift. I am blending in with people who don’t know about John or my past, and the anonymity helps me to reconnect with the part of me that’s been waiting to bloom. I am earning my own money now and helping Mom and her new husband, Phil, with the bills. But when I’m not at work, burning memories creep up, and overwhelming indignation at the degradation I’ve recently been through consumes me. The anger, the buried rage, smolders and bubbles, threatening to rise to the surface like lava overflowing from a volcano and destroying the village below.

  My steam vents are my job, a crochet hook and ball of yarn, and my grandma’s old wooden rocking chair. And when I can’t sleep or bear to feel, I have alcohol to burn the memories into hated blackened ashes. Scheduled days off from the convalescent home scare me—too much time to think. I find some comfort falling back into childhood memories of the big house in Toms River, sitting in Grandma’s smooth rocker. The vision of how her arms rested across her chest embraces me as I rock and gaze out of the big picture window in Mom’s living room. I listen to the phone ring and ring and ring, muttering curses under my breath. Back and forth, back and forth I rock, remembering her consistency and faith, imagining her anger at the betrayal of my father. Full of rage, I crochet steadily. Yarn twists around my finger tightly, cutting off blood and denting the skin near my knuckle. The lack of circulation leaves my fingers blue and cold, but I don’t pay attention to it and certainly I can’t release my grip even if I try.

  I associate only with my family. I am embarrassed at the way John falsely made me feel distrustful of them. He lied to me about everyone, telling me they didn’t care. Slowly, I am able to share with them bits and pieces of what happened, and my brother fumes and wants to strangle John for hurting me, his sister. He met John a few years back when he ran away from Mom to visit me in Glendale. John disliked him right away. Someone else who loved me was not allowed in the picture of John’s perfect world, so he fed me lies that caused me to distrust my brother and to send him away. It was painful to see how hurt he was then that I would believe John over him, and I am sickened to see how wrong I have been.

  The few details I share with Terry have her dumbstruck. “How can he have turned that way? He wasn’t like that when I was there!

  He loved you so much, Dawn, and he was so nice to me!” It is a shock to her, and she thinks it’s clear that the drugs are to blame.

  I see the drugs as the culprit too. True or not, it is the only way I can accept that any of the violent abuse has ever happened. It had to be the drugs.

  Winter’s end brings days of sunshine and snow, spring, the robins that build nests in my mother’s maple tree out front. I watch them play and forage for food while I still rock and pull the yarn ever tighter around my crochet hook. The phone rings constantly, and Mom continues to tell John, “She said no.”

  “He says he understands and to tell you that he loves you.” Mom passes messages along, giving in a bit with John’s pleadings and weeks of relentless calls.

  Exhausted from the endless ringing, everyone really just wants him to stop. Yet Terry is over often and has no problem answering the phone when it rings. She lets John talk to her. Curious, she wants to know what happened. Finding an open ear, John jumps in…he’s done that before with her. He knows Terry and speaks to her of times when he brought her food and helped us out. “He says he doesn’t want anything from you, Dawn. He only wants to talk to you.” Terry holds the phone out for me, telling me she thinks he’s sincere.

  For a moment, I feel the power of an upper hand as he exposes his vulnerable side. I have only one thing I need to know…“Where’s Thor?” I yell my first words to him, breaking my icy silence.

  “He’s fine. He’s okay. Do you want to talk to him?” Terry repeats his words to me.

  “No!”

  She continues to speak for a few minutes, then hangs up. “He wants me to watch out for you. Make sure you’re okay.”

  Blankly and unflinching, I stare at her. Can he be for real? I think. Now he wants to make sure I am okay? Yeah, right!

  “Is he high?” I ask her.

  “I don’t think so. He sounded normal. I don’t know everything that happened, Dawn, but he said he’s real sorry. He said it was the drugs. He said he and Thor miss you.”

  I see her face, furrowed brow, believing eyes, and understand how easily she is swept up in his sweet words. She is remembering the John from years ago, from the beginning. She doesn’t know how violent the drugs have made him. I can’t bear to tell her.

  “He said he’s gonna send me money to buy some film so I can take pictures of you. He wants a picture.”

  “God, Terry! What did you say? He has pictures. He has Thor too. He’s sick and on drugs, and I don’t believe him.”

  “All right, Dawn. I guess so. But he didn’t sound high to me.” Terry and I leave it at that. The charming John, the Terry food Snickers bar John, has the power over her emotions—a lot because I haven’t told my family many details, but mostly because his seduction is controlling…and for me, dangerous.

  A few days later a large package addressed to me waits on the kitchen table when I get home from work. I pick it up and flop on the couch. It’s from John. His large, exaggerated scrawl on the wrapping is unmistakable. I open it with apprehension. Inside rests photos in a mound almost two inches high of our times past. They are of happy times when we smiled and cuddled, camping trips, romantic moments a
t the beach and mountains, the tintype of us as a couple from Knott’s Berry Farm, and lots of photos of Thor. On top of the pile of colorful photos is a small, stuffed, brown Chihuahua with a note attached that reads:

  Dear Mommy

  I miss you very much and you were here.

  Daddy is taking good care of me.

  I Love you baby!

  John

  I melt. The armor protecting my emotions for the last few months is cracking. Picking up the photos carefully, one by one, I relish the tender, happy moments they represent. My mind floats on the clouds of happier times. Times I remember as the best I’ve known in my life. Pictures that pull me back into the vortex of John. After all, there are no photos of the bad times, and God knows how badly I want to forget them, pretend they never happened. I miss Thor terribly. My little, brave guy who loves me so much he’d stand up to John, a figure he loved too. I hope he’s okay.

  The phone rings. Perfect timing. I know it is John. It’s his routine late-night call he makes after I get off of work—the call I have always ignored. This time, though, I deliberately walk over and focus on the receiver. The ringing is constant, beckoning; I can almost hear John’s voice whisper, Pick up the phone, Dawn. Pick up the phone.

  On impulse, I grab the receiver. I am silent.

  “Dawn?”

  He knows it’s me.

  “Are you there?”

  I still say nothing. Silence.

  “Dawn? I, I can hear you breathe, baby.”

  John’s words cut through my very being. They’re familiar, they fit, it’s me, and I love it…and I hate it. Flooding memories cause my body to react, and I taste the chemistry we shared, bittersweet in the back of my throat. “Yeah? I’m here. What?” I’m not going to give in that easily!

  “Dawn.” His voice is low and sweet, with a faint whimper to it, as it was when my name was dear to him, when he told me it was beautiful. “I’m so sorry, baby. I told your mother I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” John sobs, a self-loathing wail, the way he did those times in the bathtub after beatings. “I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know. It was the drugs. I w, want you back, baby!” He loses his words; his crying catches in his throat. He sounds so frail and weak.