1995 — EIGHT
Eva babe, (my bitch)
Hey baby! What’s doing man?
I cant believe your parents did that shit to you.
What bitches!
I kinda know how you feel. My parents are reel
bitches too.
Especially my dad. Ask Cadence, she knows very
well. My dad beats the shit out of us, even my mom.
Its not like an every day thing or anything, but when
he gets pissed he gets many, many, pissed.
I have brusises on my head and on my thigh from
Friday morning. I snuck out w/ Cadence and Primo,
and my brother’s room went on fire so when she
went to get me I wasn’t there. She called the cops +
everything. They checked me for drugs + alcohol too.
Cadence’s mom checked her. Primo just ran home.
It sucked.
Anyways – my parents are so strict. I haven’t had a
friend over this whole year. And I’ve only been to
someones house like twice. The reason I wasn’t
allowed to go on the Washington trip was cause they
didn’t want me to sleepover.
The only time people are actually at my house is
when they just show up or something. Then I gotta |
hear my parents shit when they leave about,
“They shouldn’t just show up and expect you to be
there” … bla bla bla bla bla bla fuck you.
And so on + so forth.
My brother’s allowed to do anything though, he’s
spoiled fuckin rotten. My parents a long with the
rest of the family always tell me how much they cant
stand me and then they wonder why I am so deeply
depressed.
If they only knew how suicidal I am, I wonder
what they would do. Or if they knew I was an
alcoholic and do drugs. Or maybe how I puke up
everything I eat except for at school. They don’t know
fuckin shit about anything.
Anyways – so what did you do when you stayed home
on Monday? How was Washington? I called you, and
there was no answer + then I remembered you were
trippin, I mean, on the trip. I wish I could call you
now. But its hard when your phone’s ripped out of
the wall.
Well I gotta go now, I’m sleepy. I’ll have nice
dreams about you hunee.
C-ya tomorrow!
Oh yeah give Beezlebub a kiss on the ass for me.
Bye ByeJackie (your bitch)
P.S. oh yeah, do your parents favor your sister
or anything?
I just wanted to know…
I was secretly so jealous I wasn’t present for this escapade. To me, anything involving the cops was exciting. That was before I ever had to deal with the cops, really, aside from mall ones. I wanted to run through the woods with the local fuzz hot on my trail, and I knew my fast little long legs would have been able to outrun them as well.
I never had a sleepover with Jackie once during our entire friendship. It just wasn’t allowed. I don’t know why her parents were so overprotective, and why they didn’t realize their staunch way of parenting was actually making Jackie want to act out more. And I was really sad she wasn’t even allowed to go on the school 5-day end-of-year field trip to D.C. She would have made the perfect extra roommate for the group of girls (Bobbie Sue Heller and Kirsty Scholtz) I was sharing a hotel room with. We were short one person so they stuck us with this straight and narrow but chill girl Andrea Walden and we told her if she ratted us out on any of our late-night hotel room antics we would gag her, tie her to the bed and leave her there. And amazingly enough, our room was somehow exempted from any adult supervision whatsoever. There was a girls floor(6th) and a boys floor(4th) at the hotel. Somehow, they had forgotten to book our group on the girls floor, so we got placed last minute with the boys, two floors down. The importance of that bit of information was that there were only female chaperone’s on the girls floor, and male chaperone’s on the boys floor. Due to some kind of law that worked in our favor, the male teachers were not allowed to come in our room, they were only able to knock on our doors when it was time to fetch us. And none of the female adults ever bothered to check on us two floors below them. My junior high school was just one big enabler.
Bobbie Sue had stuffed several Tampax and O.B. tampon boxes full of pot and other drug paraphernalia because she knew, she said, no one would ever pry into a tampon box while searching for contraband. We put towels at the foot of the door, opened all the windows and took the batteries out of the room’s smoke detector. We were also really big on body spray’s from Bath and Body Works so there was a lot of peach scented mist going around as we clam-baked the bathroom of our suite. I really missed Jackie on the trip. Cadence wasn’t allowed to go because she was on academic probation, and forget about Primo’s father paying the $200 or whatever it was for food and travel expenses. We got to go on a party boat to have dinner and dancing and Kirsty and I ditched our class to fraternize with a group of kids from another junior high school in Long Island, NY. All the three of us roomies brought back as gifts for people were Washington D.C. shot glasses. My mother threw away the one I had kept for myself in my room.
I have no idea what Jackie could have been referring to in the first line of the note. The part about not believing what my parents did to me. At this time in my life it could have been anything; all these years later I feel guilty for putting them through such trying moments, and I love them even more for it, and also for not murdering me, which is what I would have done if I’d been in their places. But because of all that lovely melodrama I displayed, my offspring will probably put me through ten times worse because Karma’s a bitch.
Beelzebub was our little Satanic voodoo doll that we converted from a plush Troll doll who’s eyes lit up when you squeezed the belly. We wrote offensive words and phrases all over his body, stuck safety pins in his ears, nose and lips and god knows what else we could think of to make him uglier. The end result was a very scary looking pink haired troll. One day, one of us discovered the battery pack for his light-up eyes, located in a box that was revealed if one opened zipper running down his back and pulled out some white fluff. Then one of us got the bright idea to remove the batteries and use the casing as a stash box. We immediately thought that was the best use for the doll, and were thrilled at the brilliance of our new way to conceal drugs. As if we had really pulled one over on everyone else. He was passed back and forth between Jackie, Cadence, Bobbie Sue and me, from home to school like a slambook. And pretty soon, our little doll had grown to establish a presence at school, a persona of his own. People would want to hold him, write on him, put a ponytail in his hair, etc. and we loved having a little freak Satanic mascot for ourselves.
Thinking back on things I probably told her that I indeed felt as if my parents favored my sister. How they could have ‘prefered’ one child over the other at the time is understandable; she was a six year old angel and I was a 14 year old heathen. It was very Welcome To The Dollhouse with her and me back then. A child in a ballerina outfit who could do no wrong, paired with an obnoxious and clueless teenage girl. But it was way different then the kind of favoritism Jackie’s brother had over her. He was only a year younger than she was, but she was treated as if she was five years younger than him. He was just as big of a stoner, a skateboarder, a pervert, hung out with the same group as us, but he was the golden boy of the family and she was practically a step-child. Jackie’s behavior was an extreme measure for help to her folks who seemingly cared very little about her well being. Only it never worked. I always felt I never knew what to say to her lots of times when the subject of her fathers temper came up, and it only got worse over time. I had fights with my parents but I was never nursing cuts or bruises (that I can think of) too often. There were times when I remember chasing and being chased by my mother around the house, one of us wielding a broom or a vacuum if my memory serves me correctly. We did more swearing and yelling in my house for the most part. Door locking, door slamming, door unhinging, that kind of thing. My room was a windowless, crooked ceiling’d, mess of too many blinking Christmas lights and floor to ceiling marker scrawls, posters, magazine pages and covers, fake flowers, dead flowers, detention slips, and photographs. You name it, I probably taped it to my walls. Layers and layers eventually grew as I ran out of white space, and after I moved out, the entire room was torn out of the house during a renovation, to make room for a new one which my sister occupied while she was in high school. And once again it was covered in posters, art, Christmas lights and self-expression through wall decor. Now its been painted over and has been designated to be the guest room in which I sleep when I visit.
