Should Be Doing Math
Nov. 19th, 2006 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
Instead I'm sitting here thinking about how slippery memory is.
I remember Ears, but I also remember that he didn't move with us from High Rollers to La Puente. I vaguely remember my dad digging a small grave along the driveway, making two or three there in the gravel. Jody & Terry were living with us, but there would soon be a schism in the family where Terry was concerned. I vaguely remember both of them endlessly torturing me for a time, probably from before we moved from Rowland Heights... things like telling me our parents would never come home again, locking me in a closet, making me cry by forcing me to listen to Skeeter Davis' 'The End of the World' or that stupid 'Wildfire' song.
Somewhere in there was a Black Sabbath concert - possibly the last time my mother let me out of the house alone with the both of them. They also let me get drunk on screwdrivers at one of their parties - I went around emptying everyone's 'orange juice'. My sisters also spent time handcuffed to a large oak tree with a bunch of other kids because someone in the garage band version of Van Halen (in other words, before they officially became a signed rock band) had brought a barrel of weed to a tailgate party. There were still hippies roaming around. I went to a friend's Sunday school once & got sent out of the room because I asked the teacher about 'why is that hippy hanging on the cross?' I was one of those kids who always said things too loud, & 'hippy' was one of my favorite words. At some truckstop inhabited by a large group of bikers, my parents had to leave because when we walked in, at the top of my lungs, I asked, "Mom, dad, are all those guys hippies?"
I remember Granny crying when Elvis died. I remember Granny's funeral - she had been put in a home when it was made clear that she couldn't handle having a little kid around, much less Jody with her mouth - my eating one of her Valiums might have also had something to do with it. Granny's funeral was held on a day when there was a solar eclipse.
At some point in there Terry had started hanging out with black kids who were involved in gangs. This was before the term 'gang banger' was coined. Jody hung out with either stoners or the Mexican (at the time, 'Chicano') gangbangers. Terry ended up hooking up with this older guy, Ronnie, & got knocked up when she was 15 or 16. My mom unceremoniously threw her out of the house - not because she got pregnant, but because she got pregnant by a black guy. She ended up staying with Ronnie's mom, Lee. Lee was an alcoholic & abusive, but at the time, most parents hit their kids. Of course, Ronnie turned his violent temper on Terry & used to beat the shit out of her before & after they got married. Terry started getting involved in some of the harder drugs, coke, early forms of crack, amphetamines, etc. She was also probably hooking, but that's neither here nor there. When her kid was finally born, Ronnie Dane, he was a drug-addicted baby & the kid hasn't been right ever since, really. He was beautiful, still is - Ronnie Sr. was part Hawaiian & both Ronnie Dane & Terry's second kid, Tina, got his almond-shaped eyes & they've got gorgeous cafe au lait skin.
Jody moved with us to the house in La Puente. La Puente means 'the bridge' in Spanish. We lived on a street called 'Sandy Hook' & I remember an anchor painted on the street itself. My kindergarten was at one end of Sandy Hook. Even though our street was multi-national, the neighborhood was largely Hispanic & populated by rival Mexican gangs. Our house had a huge front & back yard, very Californian. The houses all looked different - we had a simple house, kind of like a one-story you'd see out here, but our neighbors on the right had a Spanish style home with an arched entryway, & one of our neighbors across the street had a green & white striped paint job. It was probably a basic middle-class area. I know my dad had a motorcycle briefly, and a very old, rusted out Mercedes Benz - I think he did mechanic work as a side-job. We had pomegranate and lemon trees in the back yard, an a huge bush with fragrant white flowers. It almost looked like a magnolia, but it was a bush instead of a tree. We had Nikki for awhile, but he had to be put down because the DDT exposure had given him brain damage & he made the mistake of attacking my dad. My mother liked to work outside a lot, and her own exposure to the pesticide probably layed the groundwork for the lung cancer she developed.
We had Jody's cat, Buddy (short for Budweiser) & a German Shepherd/Collie/Coyote mix named Spike that we'd picked up at the pound. We eventually got a rabbit that I named Dandelion (from Richard Adams' Watership Down) but we had to get rid of the rabbit when we got the idiotic Boston Terrier - she wouldn't stay out of the garbage & would steal food off the table - my dad had been making short ribs & she snatched some off the barbecue & choked to death on a bone before anyone could get to her. To replace the Boston, my parents got a bird dog, Lady. Spike, the German-Collie-Coyote, used to harrass Lady endlessly, & Lady figured out that Spike was afraid of water - so she'd jump in the above-ground pool we had to get away from him. Spike was afraid of everything - there'd be a rare thunderstorm & that dog would flatten himself out like a pancake & crawl under the couch til it was over. Same with fireworks.
I don't know the timing on this, but my dad had apparently owned his own semi for awhile & my folks did quite well for themselves. He worked as an independent contractor for a company called Keenan. One morning, when my dad was on the road, my mother saw his fetch in the kitchen. My dad had been in a nasty truck wreck - I never learned all the details - I know the co-driver was killed, but it financially ruined my parents. They ended up going to a few of Jody & Terry's dad's relatives (his name's Larry) for financial help, as well as Aunt Bettie & her husband Al, & it created a lot of bad blood towards my parents because they could never pay it back. I know Uncle Al had passed away before we left for Washington.
I remember kindergarten, and some of my friends. There was a little boy, Geoffrey - he lived in another neighborhood, so we only got to see each other occasionally. We loved each other in only the way 5-year old kids can love one another. We wanted to grow up & be rodeo people together. We went horseback riding together - one of Jody's friends had a ranch with Appaloosas, hawks & gennet cats. There were two boys who lived in the green & white house - John-John & David. David was maybe 12 or 13, John-John was my age. I don't think John-John went to school with me - he might have been in 1st grade. Dana went to kindergarten with me - she was one of my best friends til she moved to Marysville. I was a fat little kid, but weirdly enough, I don't remember being teased for it at that point. I remember them torturing some kid who'd wet himself. I remember some fight I had with John-John that ended with me sitting on him & repeatedly slamming his head into the sidewalk.
Because I didn't turn 5 til after September, I didn't go to kindergarten til I was 6. I remember getting into an argument with my teacher because I'd chosen to color a sheep purple (it had part of the 'Baa, Baa, black sheep' nursery rhyme on it) - she didn't like my logic that I couldn't find a black crayon, so I'd colored it purple because it was the darkest color I could find. We had two kindergarten teachers that year (along with three or four teachers' aides) because the first teacher had planted marijuana in with our tomato plants we grew & she was removed from the class. Jody used to come to class on project days to help out - we made papier mache' Santa boots one time. I also started going through a lot of tests that the other kids didn't - things that now I know were IQ tests. Things like organizing red & white cubes & various comprehension tests. Endless, endless tests. My mother & dad had made sure I could read & write before I even hit kindergarten, and when I say 'knew how to read', it was way beyond Dr. Seuss. I don't think a 1979 kindergarten teacher knew how to deal with a kid who read Shakespeare - they assumed because I could read & comprehend adult literature I was gifted. I also don't think they realized just how independent I had to be - my mother wasn't interested in treating me like a little helpless kid. I wish they had put some emphasis on the whole math thing, other than add/subtract. But, oh well. I also used to go to the eye doctor twice a week for 'eye therapy'. They were trying to strengthen & train my eye muscles in the left eye with some sort of physical therapy. I remember if you had perfect attendance, at the end of the month they had a ceremony & gave all the kids with perfect attendance a certificate for a Jr. Star burger at Carl's Jr. The last day of kindergarten, I got chicken pox. We were supposed to go to a museum called something like 'Travel Town', it had trains & old cars & was a museum of transportation. I was devastated - I remember being all dressed up in my green shorts & terry-cloth tank top that had a big ugly green bird on it that said "I only have eyes for you". I sat in front of the door bawling until my mother gave in & sent me off with Jody, telling us to say it was just mosquito bites. No one hasseled us about it, but my friend Dana got the pox from me.
I'd developed a couple of new hobbies to go with mythology - dinosaurs and animals. I knew the difference between paleontology & anthropology & archaeology & anyone who ever said, "Oh, you want to be an archaeologist when you grow up and dig up dinosaur bones?" was in for a twenty-minute lecture by a very short armchair scientist. My favorite place in the entire world was the La Brea Tar Pits. It still is. I used to know every dinosaur & prehistoric mammal by its Latin nomenclature, common name, what the names broke down into, what era they lived in, what area they lived in, where the fossils could be found... I was a junkie. I had fossils all over my room, stuffed dinosaurs (only the most realistic looking ones of course), I'd watch anything that involved dinosaurs... It was a full-blown obsession. I'd coupled that with living animals. I would spend hours in the library & come home with stacks of books about various animals. Encyclopedias. I had a card collection, kind of like the Zoo Books they advertise on t.v. now, only these were something like 'Jungle Cards', each one featuring a different animal & it's basic information (hey, I actually remember - they were called 'Safari Cards', lol). (It's pathetic how much of that I've retained. I know a 'Daddy Longlegs' isn't really a spider, it's a type of mite that lives on plant sap - all that stuff about a Daddy Longlegs being the world's most poisonous spider only its fangs are too tiny to penetrate human skin is bullshit. Daddy Longlegs can also get really, really big, and being in a freight elevator with one that's extremely curious can be unnerving.)
I think John-John's brother David molested me... we kept getting in trouble for being naked together in full view of the street, I know that for sure. I remember a lot of the things I did with various neighbor kids involved being tied up, too. I was always an Indian because the Indians always got captured & tied to a tree by various sheriffs. It's weird though, because I was sexually precocious. I know it's not considered possible at that age, but I used to masturbate by rubbing against furniture or even just flat out playing with myself, and I achieved some kind of release. I also used to tie myself up or try to squeeze into tight, restricted spaces to help the sensations. I watched a lot of nature shows (which probably explains a lot of my current proclivities - stuff you get turned on by in formative years tends to stick around), saw my parents' porn... they had a very early form of cable t.v. called 'The Z Channel', complete with a box on top of the t.v. I remember seeing the Don Bluth 'The Hobbit' cartoon on there. After-hours, the Z Channel played a lot of bad soft porn, things like the Emmanuel movies. I think I was just a born freak & the age didn't have much to do with anything.
I spent a lot of time around grown-ups. My dad would take me & my mother with him on the road during school breaks, & sometimes if he was going someplace really cool(like the time he went somewhere in either New Mexico or Arizona where the public could participate in a fossil dig), they'd pull me out of school. I spent a lot of time in truck stops, listening to truckers. Truckers are generally respectful, but I was good at making myself unobtrusive so they would forget that a child was present. I had paper dolls, so my dad would get picked on every time he opened the door to the bunk of the truck & paper doll clothes would flutter to the ground. I got to go everywhere in the back of my dad's truck.
One of my strongest memories is of a trip to Yuma, AZ. It was hot. It was so freaking hot. No a/c in the trucks, either. Or power steering for that matter. I whined the entire trip about how I would never be cool again. That night there was a freak hail storm & I whined about how I'd never be warm again. We went to the Yuma prison out there, and that was one of the darkest places I'd ever been. (See it here: Yuma Territorial Prison) I was a fairly tough little kid up until that point. Wasn't afraid of the dark, didn't have bad dreams, the ghosts didn't bother me none, dead people talked to me & I talked back... Fearless. Some of the prison cells were dug into the sides of the mountain & they were cool compared to the rest of the museum grounds, kind of nice. I kept hearing whispers, seeing things, no big deal... Got my picture taken behind prison bars as a souvenir, no big deal. At one point on the tour, the guide took us to the 'dark cell', which was used for solitary confinement. It was one of the cells built into the hillside. It was a huge bare cell with a raised stone block in the center. At each of the four corners would have been manacles. Basically, a prisoner would have been laid out on the block & chained at foot & hand. The tour guide gave a description of what it would have been like, being in this dark cell, with only rats & roaches for company - and all of a sudden, I started hearing a man screaming & sobbing incoherently. I could feel the heavy chains on my ankles & wrists, feel the cold slab under me, hear the scuttling of insects or rodents, felt something scurry over my chest. At that point, the tour guide closed the door of the cell to show everyone just how dark the 'dark cell' was & I had a hysterical fit. I ran around the dark room, smacking at the walls, looking for the door. Needless to say, when I first screamed it scared the crap out of everyone in the room & the tour guide panicked trying to get the door back open, so it took a little longer than normal, but I was already gone at that point. Blacked out. When I woke up, we were in a truck stop & my dad was eating a barbecue beef sandwich. To this day, whenever I smell a certain type of barbecue sauce, I start getting kind of queasy & panicky. They thought maybe I had banged my head on one of the walls & knocked myself unconscious - a park ranger had looked me over & told my parents to see a doctor about epilepsy, saying maybe the sudden change in lighting had triggered a seizure. Nope, not epilepsy or a concussion - my mind had just been overwhelmed by sheer terror & had escaped by shutting itself down.
It happened again at Disneyland. Disneyland, to a 5-year old who'd never seen it before, was great. I had a lot of fun out there, running rampant. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride was still politically incorrect, with a slave auction & pirates chasing bosomy wenches around grog barrels. They still had the Country Bear Jamboree, still had the Tiki Room... No 'Captain EO' at that point. I couldn't get onto the Matterhorn or Space Mountain because I was too short (and my parents were leery of putting me in really dark places since Yuma - I'd started being afraid of the dark & having nightmares), but I remember Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. The last ride we went on was The Haunted Mansion. What a cool ride, such great special effects through the whole thing. At least, right up until the end. At the end, you're in your moving seats & the chair spins around to face a mirror & a ghost's face is projected into the back of the chair. The narrator's (who might have been Vincent Price) voice tells you to check your car carefully before leaving because you don't want to take home any hitchhikers. Once again, I freaked out. The sight of that ghost sitting basically on top of me because I was between my parents & the ghost was in the middle of the car was just too much for me to handle.
I remember the California summers the most... humid, but in the area we lived in all you could smell were lemon trees & oranges. I was blonde back then - my hair started to turn darker as I got older, and I had a golden tan. My parents didn't really go to the beach much, but we would go to parks and sight-seeing. I remember earthquakes, mostly small ones that made everything shake but didn't do much damage. I remember earthquake training - stand in doorways or under load-bearing beams in your house, don't go outside under power poles, duck and cover, all that. I remember laying in bed at night & hearing the Mexican gangsters whistle codes to one another, like night birds. I remember seeing low riders, pimps all dressed up, the few remaining hippies, Vietnam vets, burn-outs panhandling. I remember Jody worked for K-Mart - they used to pay their employees in cash, knowing they'd never leave the store with all their wages. I remember seeing signs saying, "We hire people with hooks". I remember the ice cream man for our neighborhood - we all called him the dirty old man because he was always filthy. One time my mother was talking to some clean, well-dressed man like she knew him - I didn't recognize him as the dirty old ice cream man. I remember hearing Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper & Black Sabbath when they were still new. Speaking of Alice Cooper... I fell down once at Rowland Heights going to a neighbor's home. Landed on the bridge of my nose on the edge of the concrete steps. Gave me two black eyes. Everyone called me Alice Cooper for like, a month. Drove me apeshit - I remember. "I'm not Alice Cooper! Don't call me Alice Cooper!" We had a water hose in the front yard of our La Puente home with a big, heavy brass nozzle on it. We used to turn the water on full blast & let the hose whip around spraying us like a water-spouting snake. I got whacked across the bridge of my nose one time, & blackened both eyes. Again. Alice Cooper. Again. For revenge, one time in a store, I was giving my dad some kind of hassel & he acted like he was going to punch me, raising his fist in the air & saying, "Why I oughta..." menacingly. I put my hands up & hollered, "No, no daddy, don't hit me again!" He left me in that aisle & acted like he had no child with two black eyes. I still have really dark circles under my eyes - those two eye-blackenings scarred the delicate tissue there.
I used to be so freaking clumsy, mainly because of my eyesight. Sometimes just because I was a kid. My dad said when I was 2 or so, they'd take me to a park with swings & swing me. When it was time to go, they'd say "ok, Janelle, let's go" & I would just let go of the chains and fall to the ground. Didn't matter if the swing was at the top of its arc or at the ground level. I'd just let go. Same with jungle gyms & monkey bars. They'd say "let's go" and I'd find the quickest, most painful, way to the ground possible. I had a toy horse on a framework that would bounce on springs. I used to ride that thing like crazy. One time, probably because I was a fat little kid, one of the springs holding the horse up broke & ripped my leg open. I was pissed off because my dad said they would have to put the horse down for mercy. My mother had a lime-green Ford Pinto at the time. I don't think the thing about Pintos being rear-ended & blowing up is true - my mother backed that car into so many things it's not even funny. One time she backed it into a lightpole at K-Mart & knocked me onto the backseat floor (this was before everyone got so rabid about child seatbelt laws). A toothpick on the floor impaled me in the knee. She had to drive me to a hospital where a friend of hers worked as a nurse to get the thing out of me because I wouldn't let my mother touch me to even look at it. I got my ass beat for bouncing around in the back seat like a maniac & had to ride in the front seat after that. My mother had a unique child safety mechanism - the mommy arm. She was short, too, which meant that anytime she stopped the car, she would clothesline me in the throat or smack me in the forehead with her elbow. I went to our neighbor's kid's birthday party - they had a pinata & a barbecue, & we were bobbing for apples. I had just ducked my head in this barrel of water & come up with my hair streaming over my face, groping for a towel or something. I stumbled into the pinata zone & got whacked by a bat, which sent me stumbling into the barbecue grill. Got a nice third degree burn out of that one. My dad kept a shop in his garage. One time I grabbed a soldering iron by the hot end as I asked him what it was used for. I remember spending a lot of time with one limb or another in a bucket of cold water or bandages or splints or casts. My dad had been a field medic in the military (or so he said) so most mishaps involved rather brutal home care - things like having wounds literally packed with salt. It also seemed like anytime I got hurt, I got yelled at or spanked or both. I think this is partly why I get pissed off at myself when I get hurt, and why I snap at anyone who offers me assistance - I got yelled at a lot for inconveniencing other people whenever I'd get hurt or sick.
I can partly understand it - I mean, as a kid when you get hurt, it scares your parents, and I was plagued by small accidents. Some of the things that happened were because of misjudgment over position or location. Some were because, well, I was a kid & kids don't always realize that a soldering iron might be hot. Really, really, really hot. Like, hot enough to melt metal and sear a brand into living flesh. Some might have been the first stirrings of poltergeist-like phenomenon. A lot of dishes would break around me. Small things would fall off walls. Shit would go missing & turn up in bizarre places. It was all just dealt with in a matter-of-fact way, though. No one really got bothered by it, no exorcists were called in, no consultations with psychic investigators or psychologists. My mother got me plastic dishes to use. I was kind of a creepy kid to be around. I had a lot of trouble sleeping, even back then. My mother used to give me Nyquil to knock me out because when I'd be restless, the house would be restless & it was usually just her & I at home at night when my dad was on the road. It was never big obvious activity like in the movies - just small weird things that happened here & there. It was never openly discussed, either. I also started 'zoning out' around the age of 5, too. Still talked to animals, still talked to things no one else could see.
I think school let out a whole lot earlier then than it does now - either that, or we moved a month before school ended. On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted. We moved to Washington a few days before it happened. I remember driving past the mountain but it didn't make much of an impression on me. I can't say I had any precognition about the mountain at all. I don't know why we moved from California to Washington. Jody & her cat Buddy came with us, Terry and all our dogs did not. I know what happened to Terry - I think the dogs were probably given away.
I remember Ears, but I also remember that he didn't move with us from High Rollers to La Puente. I vaguely remember my dad digging a small grave along the driveway, making two or three there in the gravel. Jody & Terry were living with us, but there would soon be a schism in the family where Terry was concerned. I vaguely remember both of them endlessly torturing me for a time, probably from before we moved from Rowland Heights... things like telling me our parents would never come home again, locking me in a closet, making me cry by forcing me to listen to Skeeter Davis' 'The End of the World' or that stupid 'Wildfire' song.
Somewhere in there was a Black Sabbath concert - possibly the last time my mother let me out of the house alone with the both of them. They also let me get drunk on screwdrivers at one of their parties - I went around emptying everyone's 'orange juice'. My sisters also spent time handcuffed to a large oak tree with a bunch of other kids because someone in the garage band version of Van Halen (in other words, before they officially became a signed rock band) had brought a barrel of weed to a tailgate party. There were still hippies roaming around. I went to a friend's Sunday school once & got sent out of the room because I asked the teacher about 'why is that hippy hanging on the cross?' I was one of those kids who always said things too loud, & 'hippy' was one of my favorite words. At some truckstop inhabited by a large group of bikers, my parents had to leave because when we walked in, at the top of my lungs, I asked, "Mom, dad, are all those guys hippies?"
I remember Granny crying when Elvis died. I remember Granny's funeral - she had been put in a home when it was made clear that she couldn't handle having a little kid around, much less Jody with her mouth - my eating one of her Valiums might have also had something to do with it. Granny's funeral was held on a day when there was a solar eclipse.
At some point in there Terry had started hanging out with black kids who were involved in gangs. This was before the term 'gang banger' was coined. Jody hung out with either stoners or the Mexican (at the time, 'Chicano') gangbangers. Terry ended up hooking up with this older guy, Ronnie, & got knocked up when she was 15 or 16. My mom unceremoniously threw her out of the house - not because she got pregnant, but because she got pregnant by a black guy. She ended up staying with Ronnie's mom, Lee. Lee was an alcoholic & abusive, but at the time, most parents hit their kids. Of course, Ronnie turned his violent temper on Terry & used to beat the shit out of her before & after they got married. Terry started getting involved in some of the harder drugs, coke, early forms of crack, amphetamines, etc. She was also probably hooking, but that's neither here nor there. When her kid was finally born, Ronnie Dane, he was a drug-addicted baby & the kid hasn't been right ever since, really. He was beautiful, still is - Ronnie Sr. was part Hawaiian & both Ronnie Dane & Terry's second kid, Tina, got his almond-shaped eyes & they've got gorgeous cafe au lait skin.
Jody moved with us to the house in La Puente. La Puente means 'the bridge' in Spanish. We lived on a street called 'Sandy Hook' & I remember an anchor painted on the street itself. My kindergarten was at one end of Sandy Hook. Even though our street was multi-national, the neighborhood was largely Hispanic & populated by rival Mexican gangs. Our house had a huge front & back yard, very Californian. The houses all looked different - we had a simple house, kind of like a one-story you'd see out here, but our neighbors on the right had a Spanish style home with an arched entryway, & one of our neighbors across the street had a green & white striped paint job. It was probably a basic middle-class area. I know my dad had a motorcycle briefly, and a very old, rusted out Mercedes Benz - I think he did mechanic work as a side-job. We had pomegranate and lemon trees in the back yard, an a huge bush with fragrant white flowers. It almost looked like a magnolia, but it was a bush instead of a tree. We had Nikki for awhile, but he had to be put down because the DDT exposure had given him brain damage & he made the mistake of attacking my dad. My mother liked to work outside a lot, and her own exposure to the pesticide probably layed the groundwork for the lung cancer she developed.
We had Jody's cat, Buddy (short for Budweiser) & a German Shepherd/Collie/Coyote mix named Spike that we'd picked up at the pound. We eventually got a rabbit that I named Dandelion (from Richard Adams' Watership Down) but we had to get rid of the rabbit when we got the idiotic Boston Terrier - she wouldn't stay out of the garbage & would steal food off the table - my dad had been making short ribs & she snatched some off the barbecue & choked to death on a bone before anyone could get to her. To replace the Boston, my parents got a bird dog, Lady. Spike, the German-Collie-Coyote, used to harrass Lady endlessly, & Lady figured out that Spike was afraid of water - so she'd jump in the above-ground pool we had to get away from him. Spike was afraid of everything - there'd be a rare thunderstorm & that dog would flatten himself out like a pancake & crawl under the couch til it was over. Same with fireworks.
I don't know the timing on this, but my dad had apparently owned his own semi for awhile & my folks did quite well for themselves. He worked as an independent contractor for a company called Keenan. One morning, when my dad was on the road, my mother saw his fetch in the kitchen. My dad had been in a nasty truck wreck - I never learned all the details - I know the co-driver was killed, but it financially ruined my parents. They ended up going to a few of Jody & Terry's dad's relatives (his name's Larry) for financial help, as well as Aunt Bettie & her husband Al, & it created a lot of bad blood towards my parents because they could never pay it back. I know Uncle Al had passed away before we left for Washington.
I remember kindergarten, and some of my friends. There was a little boy, Geoffrey - he lived in another neighborhood, so we only got to see each other occasionally. We loved each other in only the way 5-year old kids can love one another. We wanted to grow up & be rodeo people together. We went horseback riding together - one of Jody's friends had a ranch with Appaloosas, hawks & gennet cats. There were two boys who lived in the green & white house - John-John & David. David was maybe 12 or 13, John-John was my age. I don't think John-John went to school with me - he might have been in 1st grade. Dana went to kindergarten with me - she was one of my best friends til she moved to Marysville. I was a fat little kid, but weirdly enough, I don't remember being teased for it at that point. I remember them torturing some kid who'd wet himself. I remember some fight I had with John-John that ended with me sitting on him & repeatedly slamming his head into the sidewalk.
Because I didn't turn 5 til after September, I didn't go to kindergarten til I was 6. I remember getting into an argument with my teacher because I'd chosen to color a sheep purple (it had part of the 'Baa, Baa, black sheep' nursery rhyme on it) - she didn't like my logic that I couldn't find a black crayon, so I'd colored it purple because it was the darkest color I could find. We had two kindergarten teachers that year (along with three or four teachers' aides) because the first teacher had planted marijuana in with our tomato plants we grew & she was removed from the class. Jody used to come to class on project days to help out - we made papier mache' Santa boots one time. I also started going through a lot of tests that the other kids didn't - things that now I know were IQ tests. Things like organizing red & white cubes & various comprehension tests. Endless, endless tests. My mother & dad had made sure I could read & write before I even hit kindergarten, and when I say 'knew how to read', it was way beyond Dr. Seuss. I don't think a 1979 kindergarten teacher knew how to deal with a kid who read Shakespeare - they assumed because I could read & comprehend adult literature I was gifted. I also don't think they realized just how independent I had to be - my mother wasn't interested in treating me like a little helpless kid. I wish they had put some emphasis on the whole math thing, other than add/subtract. But, oh well. I also used to go to the eye doctor twice a week for 'eye therapy'. They were trying to strengthen & train my eye muscles in the left eye with some sort of physical therapy. I remember if you had perfect attendance, at the end of the month they had a ceremony & gave all the kids with perfect attendance a certificate for a Jr. Star burger at Carl's Jr. The last day of kindergarten, I got chicken pox. We were supposed to go to a museum called something like 'Travel Town', it had trains & old cars & was a museum of transportation. I was devastated - I remember being all dressed up in my green shorts & terry-cloth tank top that had a big ugly green bird on it that said "I only have eyes for you". I sat in front of the door bawling until my mother gave in & sent me off with Jody, telling us to say it was just mosquito bites. No one hasseled us about it, but my friend Dana got the pox from me.
I'd developed a couple of new hobbies to go with mythology - dinosaurs and animals. I knew the difference between paleontology & anthropology & archaeology & anyone who ever said, "Oh, you want to be an archaeologist when you grow up and dig up dinosaur bones?" was in for a twenty-minute lecture by a very short armchair scientist. My favorite place in the entire world was the La Brea Tar Pits. It still is. I used to know every dinosaur & prehistoric mammal by its Latin nomenclature, common name, what the names broke down into, what era they lived in, what area they lived in, where the fossils could be found... I was a junkie. I had fossils all over my room, stuffed dinosaurs (only the most realistic looking ones of course), I'd watch anything that involved dinosaurs... It was a full-blown obsession. I'd coupled that with living animals. I would spend hours in the library & come home with stacks of books about various animals. Encyclopedias. I had a card collection, kind of like the Zoo Books they advertise on t.v. now, only these were something like 'Jungle Cards', each one featuring a different animal & it's basic information (hey, I actually remember - they were called 'Safari Cards', lol). (It's pathetic how much of that I've retained. I know a 'Daddy Longlegs' isn't really a spider, it's a type of mite that lives on plant sap - all that stuff about a Daddy Longlegs being the world's most poisonous spider only its fangs are too tiny to penetrate human skin is bullshit. Daddy Longlegs can also get really, really big, and being in a freight elevator with one that's extremely curious can be unnerving.)
I think John-John's brother David molested me... we kept getting in trouble for being naked together in full view of the street, I know that for sure. I remember a lot of the things I did with various neighbor kids involved being tied up, too. I was always an Indian because the Indians always got captured & tied to a tree by various sheriffs. It's weird though, because I was sexually precocious. I know it's not considered possible at that age, but I used to masturbate by rubbing against furniture or even just flat out playing with myself, and I achieved some kind of release. I also used to tie myself up or try to squeeze into tight, restricted spaces to help the sensations. I watched a lot of nature shows (which probably explains a lot of my current proclivities - stuff you get turned on by in formative years tends to stick around), saw my parents' porn... they had a very early form of cable t.v. called 'The Z Channel', complete with a box on top of the t.v. I remember seeing the Don Bluth 'The Hobbit' cartoon on there. After-hours, the Z Channel played a lot of bad soft porn, things like the Emmanuel movies. I think I was just a born freak & the age didn't have much to do with anything.
I spent a lot of time around grown-ups. My dad would take me & my mother with him on the road during school breaks, & sometimes if he was going someplace really cool(like the time he went somewhere in either New Mexico or Arizona where the public could participate in a fossil dig), they'd pull me out of school. I spent a lot of time in truck stops, listening to truckers. Truckers are generally respectful, but I was good at making myself unobtrusive so they would forget that a child was present. I had paper dolls, so my dad would get picked on every time he opened the door to the bunk of the truck & paper doll clothes would flutter to the ground. I got to go everywhere in the back of my dad's truck.
One of my strongest memories is of a trip to Yuma, AZ. It was hot. It was so freaking hot. No a/c in the trucks, either. Or power steering for that matter. I whined the entire trip about how I would never be cool again. That night there was a freak hail storm & I whined about how I'd never be warm again. We went to the Yuma prison out there, and that was one of the darkest places I'd ever been. (See it here: Yuma Territorial Prison) I was a fairly tough little kid up until that point. Wasn't afraid of the dark, didn't have bad dreams, the ghosts didn't bother me none, dead people talked to me & I talked back... Fearless. Some of the prison cells were dug into the sides of the mountain & they were cool compared to the rest of the museum grounds, kind of nice. I kept hearing whispers, seeing things, no big deal... Got my picture taken behind prison bars as a souvenir, no big deal. At one point on the tour, the guide took us to the 'dark cell', which was used for solitary confinement. It was one of the cells built into the hillside. It was a huge bare cell with a raised stone block in the center. At each of the four corners would have been manacles. Basically, a prisoner would have been laid out on the block & chained at foot & hand. The tour guide gave a description of what it would have been like, being in this dark cell, with only rats & roaches for company - and all of a sudden, I started hearing a man screaming & sobbing incoherently. I could feel the heavy chains on my ankles & wrists, feel the cold slab under me, hear the scuttling of insects or rodents, felt something scurry over my chest. At that point, the tour guide closed the door of the cell to show everyone just how dark the 'dark cell' was & I had a hysterical fit. I ran around the dark room, smacking at the walls, looking for the door. Needless to say, when I first screamed it scared the crap out of everyone in the room & the tour guide panicked trying to get the door back open, so it took a little longer than normal, but I was already gone at that point. Blacked out. When I woke up, we were in a truck stop & my dad was eating a barbecue beef sandwich. To this day, whenever I smell a certain type of barbecue sauce, I start getting kind of queasy & panicky. They thought maybe I had banged my head on one of the walls & knocked myself unconscious - a park ranger had looked me over & told my parents to see a doctor about epilepsy, saying maybe the sudden change in lighting had triggered a seizure. Nope, not epilepsy or a concussion - my mind had just been overwhelmed by sheer terror & had escaped by shutting itself down.
It happened again at Disneyland. Disneyland, to a 5-year old who'd never seen it before, was great. I had a lot of fun out there, running rampant. The Pirates of the Caribbean ride was still politically incorrect, with a slave auction & pirates chasing bosomy wenches around grog barrels. They still had the Country Bear Jamboree, still had the Tiki Room... No 'Captain EO' at that point. I couldn't get onto the Matterhorn or Space Mountain because I was too short (and my parents were leery of putting me in really dark places since Yuma - I'd started being afraid of the dark & having nightmares), but I remember Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. The last ride we went on was The Haunted Mansion. What a cool ride, such great special effects through the whole thing. At least, right up until the end. At the end, you're in your moving seats & the chair spins around to face a mirror & a ghost's face is projected into the back of the chair. The narrator's (who might have been Vincent Price) voice tells you to check your car carefully before leaving because you don't want to take home any hitchhikers. Once again, I freaked out. The sight of that ghost sitting basically on top of me because I was between my parents & the ghost was in the middle of the car was just too much for me to handle.
I remember the California summers the most... humid, but in the area we lived in all you could smell were lemon trees & oranges. I was blonde back then - my hair started to turn darker as I got older, and I had a golden tan. My parents didn't really go to the beach much, but we would go to parks and sight-seeing. I remember earthquakes, mostly small ones that made everything shake but didn't do much damage. I remember earthquake training - stand in doorways or under load-bearing beams in your house, don't go outside under power poles, duck and cover, all that. I remember laying in bed at night & hearing the Mexican gangsters whistle codes to one another, like night birds. I remember seeing low riders, pimps all dressed up, the few remaining hippies, Vietnam vets, burn-outs panhandling. I remember Jody worked for K-Mart - they used to pay their employees in cash, knowing they'd never leave the store with all their wages. I remember seeing signs saying, "We hire people with hooks". I remember the ice cream man for our neighborhood - we all called him the dirty old man because he was always filthy. One time my mother was talking to some clean, well-dressed man like she knew him - I didn't recognize him as the dirty old ice cream man. I remember hearing Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper & Black Sabbath when they were still new. Speaking of Alice Cooper... I fell down once at Rowland Heights going to a neighbor's home. Landed on the bridge of my nose on the edge of the concrete steps. Gave me two black eyes. Everyone called me Alice Cooper for like, a month. Drove me apeshit - I remember. "I'm not Alice Cooper! Don't call me Alice Cooper!" We had a water hose in the front yard of our La Puente home with a big, heavy brass nozzle on it. We used to turn the water on full blast & let the hose whip around spraying us like a water-spouting snake. I got whacked across the bridge of my nose one time, & blackened both eyes. Again. Alice Cooper. Again. For revenge, one time in a store, I was giving my dad some kind of hassel & he acted like he was going to punch me, raising his fist in the air & saying, "Why I oughta..." menacingly. I put my hands up & hollered, "No, no daddy, don't hit me again!" He left me in that aisle & acted like he had no child with two black eyes. I still have really dark circles under my eyes - those two eye-blackenings scarred the delicate tissue there.
I used to be so freaking clumsy, mainly because of my eyesight. Sometimes just because I was a kid. My dad said when I was 2 or so, they'd take me to a park with swings & swing me. When it was time to go, they'd say "ok, Janelle, let's go" & I would just let go of the chains and fall to the ground. Didn't matter if the swing was at the top of its arc or at the ground level. I'd just let go. Same with jungle gyms & monkey bars. They'd say "let's go" and I'd find the quickest, most painful, way to the ground possible. I had a toy horse on a framework that would bounce on springs. I used to ride that thing like crazy. One time, probably because I was a fat little kid, one of the springs holding the horse up broke & ripped my leg open. I was pissed off because my dad said they would have to put the horse down for mercy. My mother had a lime-green Ford Pinto at the time. I don't think the thing about Pintos being rear-ended & blowing up is true - my mother backed that car into so many things it's not even funny. One time she backed it into a lightpole at K-Mart & knocked me onto the backseat floor (this was before everyone got so rabid about child seatbelt laws). A toothpick on the floor impaled me in the knee. She had to drive me to a hospital where a friend of hers worked as a nurse to get the thing out of me because I wouldn't let my mother touch me to even look at it. I got my ass beat for bouncing around in the back seat like a maniac & had to ride in the front seat after that. My mother had a unique child safety mechanism - the mommy arm. She was short, too, which meant that anytime she stopped the car, she would clothesline me in the throat or smack me in the forehead with her elbow. I went to our neighbor's kid's birthday party - they had a pinata & a barbecue, & we were bobbing for apples. I had just ducked my head in this barrel of water & come up with my hair streaming over my face, groping for a towel or something. I stumbled into the pinata zone & got whacked by a bat, which sent me stumbling into the barbecue grill. Got a nice third degree burn out of that one. My dad kept a shop in his garage. One time I grabbed a soldering iron by the hot end as I asked him what it was used for. I remember spending a lot of time with one limb or another in a bucket of cold water or bandages or splints or casts. My dad had been a field medic in the military (or so he said) so most mishaps involved rather brutal home care - things like having wounds literally packed with salt. It also seemed like anytime I got hurt, I got yelled at or spanked or both. I think this is partly why I get pissed off at myself when I get hurt, and why I snap at anyone who offers me assistance - I got yelled at a lot for inconveniencing other people whenever I'd get hurt or sick.
I can partly understand it - I mean, as a kid when you get hurt, it scares your parents, and I was plagued by small accidents. Some of the things that happened were because of misjudgment over position or location. Some were because, well, I was a kid & kids don't always realize that a soldering iron might be hot. Really, really, really hot. Like, hot enough to melt metal and sear a brand into living flesh. Some might have been the first stirrings of poltergeist-like phenomenon. A lot of dishes would break around me. Small things would fall off walls. Shit would go missing & turn up in bizarre places. It was all just dealt with in a matter-of-fact way, though. No one really got bothered by it, no exorcists were called in, no consultations with psychic investigators or psychologists. My mother got me plastic dishes to use. I was kind of a creepy kid to be around. I had a lot of trouble sleeping, even back then. My mother used to give me Nyquil to knock me out because when I'd be restless, the house would be restless & it was usually just her & I at home at night when my dad was on the road. It was never big obvious activity like in the movies - just small weird things that happened here & there. It was never openly discussed, either. I also started 'zoning out' around the age of 5, too. Still talked to animals, still talked to things no one else could see.
I think school let out a whole lot earlier then than it does now - either that, or we moved a month before school ended. On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted. We moved to Washington a few days before it happened. I remember driving past the mountain but it didn't make much of an impression on me. I can't say I had any precognition about the mountain at all. I don't know why we moved from California to Washington. Jody & her cat Buddy came with us, Terry and all our dogs did not. I know what happened to Terry - I think the dogs were probably given away.
