Taylor the Teacher

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Here’s some truth about me:

When I was a kid  ~8? 9?~ my family was troubled royally fucked up. For a couple of years we lived in this hideously ugly green rental house on a street named Feldspar in Houston. Both parents were working full time, and I was a latch key kid. Dad was in college full-time as well, and was always studying ~computer science. remember those punch cards?~ when he was home. Mom was frazzed and often forgot to feed me before school & even more often forgot to give me lunch money. It took me years to realize that the disdainful looks I received from the lunch ladies who gave me free lunch tickets day after day weren’t for me at all, but for my parents. It honestly never crossed my mind that this might not be my fault. The power of unchallenged paradigms. ~any teachers out there: remember that. abused and neglected kids need to be EXPLICITLY TOLD that these things ARE NOT their fault~

It was during this particularly bad time that an old man, who went by the nickname “Peanut,” decided it would be a good idea to have sex with me ~i think. i don’t remember everything, don’t remember actual intercourse, but plenty of other shit that simply should not have happened. the question of whether or not i was a “real” virgin haunted me for years~ I was an extremely fearful child, and didn’t want to stay home alone, but also didn’t want to go to his house. He was my on-again, off-again babysitter. My parents didn’t know until years later what had happened, although I did start to suddenly wet the bed wide awake, which nowadays would probably be more of a clue than it was to my distracted parents back then, before these things were openly talked about like they are now. 

Later, when I was 25, I went back to that old neighborhood thinking that somehow seeing the place might help me to heal. Here’s what I wrote after I came back from that trip to Houston:

I was anxious going down Bingle [road] and definitely nervous. But I did find our old house. It’s blue now, and the garage door my father knocked me into has become a bay window. He was mad. Accusing me of lying. He pulled my hair and forced me to lie because he thought it was the truth. Anyway. Our house looks much less menacing now. Bright, actually. Those holes in the grass where the gas lines were are still there. I remember running over them & through the yard, something I’d done so many times I knew exactly where they were — when and how high to jump. I went between our house and his many times, apparently.

I walked back and forth between them that day. It was hot, hot hot. I sat on the curb in front of his house a while, then went past all the other houses one at a time. I saw the house of the mean woman that used to babysit my brother. I saw that man’s house that took my dog, Chewbacca, into the country because he wouldn’t stop eating the siding off our house. ~now i wonder, did chewbacca really go to the country? isn’t that what everyone tells their kids when they send an animal off to die?~

I went up to his house. Up to the back fence. There were stickers on every window indicating the house was protected against the forces of evil breaking in to steal the VCR.

Interesting.

I had for years remembered the flower bed, front and center of that house, with rocks bordering it and the “wild” strawberries that grew in it. We always looked for berries to eat, “we” being myself and his grand daughter. As far as I can remember we found none.

The barren berry plants were uprooted and the fresh concrete that replaced them stuck out, at least to my eyes, next to the old, grease-stained driveway with weeds growing in the cracks. I walked back down the driveway, feeling something needed to be released in me and waiting for some thing or some smell to provoke THE memory that would reveal everything like I’ve read in all the psycho-babble books.

Nope.

I walked down again to my house. I could see the window to my old room where I’d decided to have a puppet show for the neighborhood. Dad wasn’t happy, as the Feldspar Little Theatre scheduling department had failed to consider that the show fell on a workday during dinner. I was so excited about my puppet show I’d written that I didn’t even think of that. ~nor did I ask mommy before announcing my plans to all the neighborhood~

That was the day I heard my uncle Mark was in jail.

So the scolding I got over the puppet show was intertwined with the story of what uncle Mark had done wrong. The news of his brother’s incarceration no doubt had something to do with my father’s lack of patience with the puppet show. ~mark had a drug problem, and had been arrested for attempted murder of his own mother because she had finally locked him out of the house~

I really wanted to see inside my old back yard and crawled through high weeds to see between the boards. ~it had been a chain-link fence when we lived there~ Nothing. I couldn’t see in, and besides, people were staring. I knew they were well within their social “rights” to wonder why I was poking around their neighborhood, but my feelings said, “I belong here, not them.”

So I walked down the street again. I sat down at the edge of his driveway and the tears came. I didn’t even realize how hot it was.

Then, a still, small voice inside me said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

The truth is, I was living, and the memories I was attempting to bring up were of dead things. Still, I didn’t realize I was among the living. I thought I belonged there. How long before dead things are really, truly buried?