content warnings:  child sex abuse mention tho i don’t go into any detail at all, child neglect and abuse, poverty, violence.

In this big post I tried to say everything I can remember about all the places I’d lived as a child, and as many places as that was, there may be some pretty big gaps.  Life isn’t a story with a three act structure and a cool hook.  Though one can tease it into something resembling that, I’m just trying to get it all out, bit by bit, before the dust of time blows over it all.  Before I start to forget who and where I am – to the extent that I am anything, which is an occasional issue for me.

In that post I said I would expand on those entries individually.  Better nate than lever.  I approach the task…

In the beginning, I was born into a housing project in suburban California.  My father reenlisted in the army and hauled us between another few states, but we came back to land in the same shitty spot, and all my earliest memories were there.  I didn’t know it was a project until recently, having a conversation with my dad.

My dad recently told me for the first time that when I was a toddler, my sister had shut me into a footlocker and was being secretive about where I was.  He said I could have suffocated, might have been an early hint of her antisocial personality disorder.  That might be a dramatic take on it, and I do not remember the incident at all.

Seemed like any of dozens of places I’ve lived.  Beige carpet, cottage cheese texture walls, popcorn ceiling.  The closer we got to the nineties the more every interior light fixture became titty domes, but back then in the middle o’ Cali, they were frosted glass squares with an organic bulge in the middle.  The open sides collected more flies than titty lights.

I don’t remember the layout very well, but maybe the dining room faced an interior courtyard to the east, the bedroom I shared with my brother faced west and was south of the entrance.  I feel like it was the ground floor and while there were two story buildings in the complex, this wasn’t one of them.  The dining room and kitchen would have shared a cheap linoleum floor with optional cigarette burns and cracks.  I don’t recall ever seeing a cockroach, but it may have been the feebleness of crawling out of infancy hobbling my senses – I cannot imagine such a place not having roaches.

The euphemism for kids doing weird sexual crap is “playing doctor” and some amount of that happened there.  The nature of it, in combination with later information, suggests to me that my older sister may have been sexually abused at an extremely young age, and it gave her ideas.  We weren’t even in school yet when that happened, at least I wasn’t.  It might have been in preschool for her.  My dad is a piece of shit scumbag, but not that flavor.

I remember my dad singing a drinking song when we were there.  Only one part of it.  “Beer, beer, beer, said the sergeant, merry men are we;  For there’s none so fair that they can compare with the airborne infantry.”  There were artifacts of his time in the army – duffel bags, fatigues.  I might have seen him in uniform once.  He wasn’t fat yet, but he seemed like a giant, like king kong compared to me.  I never did get as manly-looking as him, which I can be thankful for as I’m more transfeminine now*.  Dude looks like Herman Munster with big gorilla hands.  Jack Torrance hairline to match his creepy demeanor.

There’s a photograph of me from that time.  I’m wearing a magenta coat and turning around in my seat, looking down.  Maybe there was a bird on the ground.  Behind me, at an outdoor restaurant table under an umbrella, my dad was drinking a bottle of michelob while four or five empties sat on the table in front of him.  Think he had a suitably 70s-80s moustache.  Dook dook, little boozehound.  Sweet dreams.

I remember I had a little green ensemble with Richard Simmons length shorts and matching t-shirt, with blue and white stripes down the side.  I liked the material, a kind of fake velvety stuff but not shiny.  There’s another picture of me with my adult teeth starting to come in, the overbite fully developed.  It propped my mouth open and I looked pretty damn dorky until I learned more self-awareness around ten and forced my lips shut until they stuck like that.  In that picture I was smiling but had extreme eyebags.  Maybe it was taken on the day I learned about daylight savings time and was certain it was a bad joke.

As I mentioned in the other post, the project was next to some golden fields of wheat, or some other crop.  I saw a tumbleweed in the parking lot once; I saw lightning strike in a field in broad daylight.  I learned what hail is.

I learned what sickness is.  One morning I projectile vomited my breakfast cereal, forming a lifetime memory.  It was in that place I contracted the chicken pox, with feverish delirium, itching, the usual – leaving silvery white scars on my body.  I don’t remember any cool fever dreams, unfortunately, only the itching, and being too exhausted to move.  Sleeping propped up so I could breathe, losing track of day and night.

I must have learned to read and write during that time, but I could not read cursive writing yet.  I remember drawing a bunch of loops on paper to emulate how my mother wrote.  I have been told it was my sister who taught me to read, and that tracks – my parents were neglectful.

With any sort of fault, it’s different from person to person.  Some neglectful parents starve their children to death, some just turn a blind eye to mental illness and serious issues while being seemingly supportive in other ways.  My mom managed to not kill us, to generally nourish us, but we were getting skin conditions and bad hygiene habits that would haunt us for a long time.  My dad was putting the whole job of parenting on her, while he was having alcohol and drug issues.  So even with antisocial personality disorder developing, my sister must’ve felt like teaching me was a fun thing to do with her time, made her feel big, and therefore I’m literate.

We had a TV back then and the only thing I can really remember watching at home is Dukes of Hazzard in its initial run.  I probably watched Sesame Street and cartoons, but I don’t remember doing that at home.  Happened somewhere else, maybe grandparents’ house.  I know that’s where I saw Flash Gordon, Kung Fu, and Man from Atlantis.  Saw some westerns I can’t remember, some football games.  I don’t remember any specific books from that time.  I do remember the radio was that barfy saccharine late 70s early 80s guff.  Sing it with a perm and rhinestones on your evening gown or lapels.

A grandmother made us quilts with our names and dates of birth on them.  Mine was chiefly yellow with lavender embroidery for the name, black squares with a citrus fruit motif.  It got pretty beat up and some purple bubble gum permanently adhered before it was retired.  I feel like my brother had a light blue “security blanket,” like Linus in Peanuts, but this could be mistaking comics for real life.

I didn’t think about being a middle child much, as a thing, but I did identify with those sardonic characters, the exasperated calm at the center of the wacky circumstance, like Charlie Brown and Kermit the Frog.  I was reading the Sunday comics, tho I didn’t understand a lot of what they were talking about.  I liked the art style on Tank McNamara, but had no effin idea what the sportball jokes were about.

I remember my brother sleeping in a crib and some kinda fuss about when he stopped.  I remember not thinking anything much of the fact my sister was from a different father and was biracial.  Maybe kids are less prejudiced without bad influences, maybe it’s because she was one year older and therefore The Boss, or maybe it’s because she unmistakably did look like us – just with brown eyes, coffee-colored skin, and loose brown curls.

One time when we were outdoors at night, I was playing with a toy gun and tried to throw it to my brother, and it hit her close to the eye, cut her skin.  The parents insisted I apologize and I distinctly remember feeling it made no sense to do so when no ill intent was involved.  They did not successfully explain to me that recklessness is as much something to apologize for as maliciousness, just made me feel like I had to eat shit for no reason.  Is there no communication in this household?  Thereafter toy guns were not allowed.

I’m gonna do a separate post for the grandparents’ house, I think.  And another for excursions, another for school.  Got a few more things to say here and it’s already run long.

I remember my dad combing my hair after a bath and asking which side I wanted it parted on.  I didn’t know what that meant and said both?  He said ok haha and ran the comb over my head on both sides, one after the other.  With his big-ass gorilla hands, that caused me pain.  I was genuinely mad, which I’m sure amused him more.  The things we remember the best in life are humiliations and pain, generally.

And names?  When I was a child I remembered names very well.  On some occasion I was left to play at the apartment of a boy named Dennis Kessler.  Only name I remember between then and elementary school tho.  He was blond (I was too at that time) and not too rude.  He had a lot of toy cars, which I was impressed by.  He had a toy truck where you could stick cars in the back of it, and that was fun.  Toy cars were more likely to be metal at that time, tho some were plastic as well.  I feel like this was a situation where I was being stashed so my mom could fuck off and do something bad, but who knows?

Last thing of note here was my very earliest memory – getting punched in the nose when arguing over a swing.  I would have been three or four, the boy much bigger.  First of many bloody noses in youth, tho the only one I can recall being directly caused by violence.  I have a deviated septum, which could well be from that incident.  I had a dim recollection there were adults in the background who did not care.  Recently my father told me they were Hell’s Angels.  If your beak is gonna be fucked up for life, might as well be from a Hell’s Angel baby.

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* this feels unfair to trans gals with very masculine faces.  not sure the best way to express this without triggering someone’s gender dysphoria, but i wanted to express where i am on that, for myself.  to most i’m sure i also look frankensteiny, and in alternate world where i’m not with my husband, i would totally get with another frankenstein girl.  but few of us would want to be her.  i just recognize tha struggle?