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I’m a very sad and crazy person; let’s get that straight right away. Let’s have no doubts about it. I’m a twenty-two year old baby who basks in brief moments of illusory grandeur, but the fact of the matter is I’m just a young version of the crazy woman talking to herself on the street. If anyone wonders who these women were in their earlier days, they need only turn to me. We all start somewhere. The only reason I’m not there yet is because of my youth and my luck in inheriting a large sum of money that I’m steadily pissing away. The large sum of money, given to me by my grandmother on my father’s side, could have been much larger if not for the greed of my father’s family. The interpretation of a will is a long, draining process. I’d only known about wills from television shows and gossip stories. You should really get a lawyer, everyone said. Families always fuck each other when it comes to money. I didn’t take the warnings seriously. How sad. I refused to believe a word of it, despite the very reality of my being fucked by my family over money. One’s will can never fully be expressed through language, this I know, and that is why we have lawyers to interpret the ambiguities. A settlement was reached just recently, and though the sum of money that my sister and I inherited was great, it could have been much greater. The large sum of money could have been twice the amount that it ended up being, though I don’t know exactly why I would need that much money. The large sum of money also could have been an infinite well of love, emotional security, and daddyisms if not for my father’s drug addictions and early death. Of this, I can’t be certain. An ill mind thinks of these things. An ill mind turns uncertainty into a fairyland of better living. A healthy mind sees the better life ahead of them, not outside their reach. Money, money, money makes the world go round blah blah blah... makes the world spin out of control more like it... makes everybody dizzy and frantic with grief and greed and hunger and obesity and stupidity and paperwork paperwork paperwork. I’ve never had much money, or much paperwork, until recently. Most of my people only have birth certificates and social security cards. A few have driver’s licenses and almost none have passports. They’re not going anywhere very far.
My people are poor and white. We’re a large group of people, living in piss-stinking pockets of just about every corner of the continent, and we are not without our distinctive qualities. Poor white people are arrogant, and refuse to acknowledge our poverty. We refuse to acknowledge each other. My people are lonely and delusional. My people are self-righteous and hypocritical. My people don’t exist because they wear hats and gloves that make them invisible and untraceable. My people play in oily puddles that form in the depressed regions of our parking lots behind our apartment buildings, and we also play in dumpsters, but that was when we were small people and not allowed to vote. That was when the projects were a fun and engaging place, more fun than an amusement park. As children we climbed diseased trees that grew by a fence along the parking lot where we played in oily puddles. The trees were a home where we played house, but our homes were places where there wasn’t any love. One tree had an over-sized root that resembled a toilet and that’s where we pissed. One tree was easy to climb and that was the look out tower. We tried to attach jump ropes to the top of it and make an elevator. The parking lot would get messy with beer cans and litter left by the adults. My sister organized a clean up crew and we all brought brooms from our homes to tidy the place up. She said if we did a good job she’d get Woodsy Owl to come and we’d be on TV. She was never satisfied though. We never cleaned it well enough and she’d yell. She’d scream and tell us to work harder. She’d scream at me especially and throw me around and kick me. The kids would stop cleaning because they wanted to play, and that would make her even more furious. Next thing she knew she had a full-fledged revolt on her hands and none of the kids wanted to play with her. That’s my sister, and that’s how we grew up: filthy and angry, with no one to play with. I can’t remember if we were barefoot all the time or if that’s just how I remember it, but we were disgusting, and I don’t think our mother ever bathed us. Some of the other kids had it worse.
I’m not apologizing for my people, and the people we eventually become, but the filth never seems to leave us. Everything about us remains grimy, obscene, and unhealthy. We’ll never admit it though, and there is no ‘we.’ I don’t know who my people are anymore because nobody does. I may be the only person I know, and I may be the only person who knows me. If nobody else knows me, then there’s a good chance I don’t exist. One could argue either way.
Though I will apologize over and over again in the stories to follow, I won’t bother with any large apology for the bigger story of my ill fated, or rather poorly executed, existence. It’s hard for me to know exactly how unique these stories are, since my people deny everything, but I don’t really care. This is the way it is, the way it was. These are the rant-musings of a crazy person about why it all had to be this particular way.
I probably never would have taken the time to rant had it not been for my inheritance. I was doing fine without money; happily pretending that I came from nowhere in particular, and was the daughter of so and so, who did this or that. Money somehow made everything seem more dangerous and uncertain, and my thoughts became more obviously menacing. When my father’s family began money-fucking me in the head they started pushing other shit to the surface. The cast of characters that make up the playbill of my life became a constant cartoon forming mayhem in my brain. There’s Cheryl, my mother of many addictions, holding a mirror with her flabby arms, forcing me to look or not look, both reactions to shame. There’s my sister, a strange and violent double, loving and hating me with equal intensity, both a manifestation of anger. There’s Ally, my true friend, a second-self to be proud of, and her family-- a circus of freaks and clowns themselves, but kind and educated. There are the countless others who wander in and out of my head, mischievous little demons bonded by blood or otherwise, doing things to me and to each other, forming a strange orgy in the small pocket of my skull. They’re all fucking shit up in there. Lori told me most of the money-fucking was done by my dear Aunt Debbie, so my story should begin with her. I’ll begin, then, with the summer I had nothing to do.