My life in the early nineties was dominated by my obsession with what happened to all the daughters: all the girls asleep in their beds while down the hall, across the sea or outside under the porch light their mother was being murdered. Meanwhile I was going through all my own break ups the wild mad relationships the meetings and the art shows the car accidents and the men and their rehabs and all the dates, the dinners in dull restaurants. I was beginning to write; to say to myself: tell what it’s like to be an abandoned girl grown into a woman tell it until you don’t know who the reader or the writer is who is the subject and who is the object.
Always question the observer, question if it is even possible to be an objective observer.
I was working as an image researcher in the Editorial Library of the Los Angeles Times, learning the truth of that old cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. Especially true the day the call came in for photographs of Nicole Brown Simpson. Found butchered on the front steps of her upscale townhouse in a ritzy LA neighborhood. The wire services needed photos of this unknown woman married to a very known man. So, I fired up the photo database and found one immediately. A photo from a fund-raising event. Her demeanor in the picture like a girl child’s; the way his hands bracketed her body. Killed outside her home on a Sunday night. In a neighborhood of coral trees and bougainvillea. Two young children asleep upstairs.
My synapses snapped back to the night two fighting men rolled through my childhood bedroom. Fighting over Mama. Blood on their bodies. Blood on the shag carpeting. Blood play disrupting the day. Remaking me, remaking my world. My outlook. My instincts.
Re-configuring my relationship to the world.
After that knife fight in my own young life, I wrote this sentence in my head: I will be eight years old forever. Standing on a corner waiting for the school crossing guard to tell me it was okay to walk across the street and go home. I didn’t want to go home. There was nobody there who would protect me, listen to me, take care of me. But I had to go home. There was nowhere else to go to and my brother and sister needed me.
I knew the kind of trauma Nicole Simpson’s children would feel.
Feel forever.
As the years pass, traumatic memory doesn’t fade, it tells an ever more insistent story.
I began to search through the microfilm, the clip files, the rolling shelves of photo files, looking for more images of this now dead woman and her very famous man. I found articles about spousal battery. Kicking. Screaming threats. Refusal to leave the premises. The woman hiding in bushes, waiting to be rescued. Hoping to be saved.
I’d spent five years looking through those rolling Lektrievers of memory, searching for this or that: high jumpers, TV stars, all the things pictures are taken of in a city built on nice shots, glamorous shots, deadly shots, deflective and descriptive shots. I enjoyed the quiet mental task of sorting through images, a kind of conceptual housekeeping. Well versed in what others thought looked appropriate, the universal, the clever, sometimes the slightly provocative, I delighted in finding the image equivalent to a descriptive phrase or the visual record of just this or that, place or time or event, the correct image to set the story off. Entice. Make the observer want to work harder, hard enough to read through appearances.
Forget about the pretty façade. Look deeper. Look longer.
Meanwhile I was dating dangerous strangers, men who provided much in the way of memory jogs. Points of departure into the realm of story.
One guy was truly crazy. Just like Mama.
“You left me bruised man,” I told him over the phone the next day, but I wasn't complaining. I remembered the smooth firm skin of his biceps. His aquiline nose, the flare of his nostrils. After work I went by his condo a few blocks from Hollywood Blvd. Knocked and knocked on his front door, rang the buzzer for over a minute.
He didn’t come to the door, wouldn’t let me in. I knew he was there because I’d seen his car in the parking garage.
A man I’d connected with through an online dating service. Display and like, comment and like, commiserate and like. Like and receive reaffirmation. Like and receive more likes. Count the likes and feel better about your life... some days everything I took in made me, no, ignited in me, a burning vague ache of want. That could have been me, I’d think when I looked at the accomplishments of others. If only. What? I couldn’t name the feeling appropriately. Caught up in comparisons, more deadly than body beauty. Brain engorged with a sense of finality.
This is all you will ever get. Deal with it. Boogey men. Unreliable men. Damaged dads. Fathers, who fought over your mother and lost, then abandoned you, and left you with her.
How do you calculate the lasting effect on a growing psyche of such primal lies?
No place to go for solace and understanding. For years I just wrote captions in my head, brief descriptions under images burned into my consciousness, struggling to record, to not ever forget what had happened, so that one day I might be able to weave all those captions together into a story. I wanted to tell a story which honored my siblings, tell the truth about what had happened to us even if that story would not ever be read by anyone.
Adrift with a mentally ill mother, all of us fathered by men who drank and ran leaving their children behind.
I lived within the lonely solitude of a child who was daily witnessing more than she was able to comprehend, with no one to talk with, to share my darkest fears. Our mother seldom spoke to me. Seldom held a conversation with any of us.
She really never knew me at all. Didn’t know what I loved and what I didn’t.
Maybe this British writer guy would get me. Kismet. Who knows.
I had liked his image immediately.
We met in a club on Venice Boulevard. I was already seated comfortably in a booth at the back of the bar when I saw him come in, the man who would change everything, or so I hoped.
All I wanted was a stunning love, one that would take me out of numbness. Like the love Lou Reed had for Laurie Anderson. Lovers, collaborators, and best friends.
I was forty years old and still alone. Beginning to write wondering if I could face the story I had to tell. Sometimes I asked myself why my story should matter to anyone but me and my siblings. Then I remembered abuse is systemic, universal, oppressive, and damaging on a personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural level.
It was only when I was inside of his condo that I grew fearful, as fearful as anyone can be who sits all day in the darkness of her own mind. In the end I shook it off and took to singing—for I imagined no one has to think very hard when they sing, and I was right! Though it didn’t make much sense I sang: Ya Got Trouble, from the music man.
“Oh, the trouble I’m in,” I sang. “Right here in River City.”
The fever of that night. Tied to his bed in a Hollywood condo, by my hands and feet. Clothing half off, his clothes on, convinced by his voice, the British accent, and the playfulness. You are flirting with disaster my friends said. I knew they were right. But here’s the thing. If you are a curious woman and you hear that kind of crap long enough you rebel, become an actual rebel, rebel, just like in the Bowie song and soon the work of your life becomes a relentless critical examination of the hierarchical apparatus. The personal is no longer just political, the personal is proof, proof to the world of your subjugation, your lack of agency, and a powerful sign of their Pedagogic logic.
Those assholes how I loved them.
Security cameras everywhere: bedroom, living room, garage. He watched them as he tied me up. Toyed with me for a bit before we both fell asleep. I awoke to him atop me, pushing down. Scratched his face, grabbed his hair, and tried to muscle him off. But he was stronger and meaner, and unrelenting. Smacked me until I lay there staring into the green eyes of the bogeyman.
“More, more,” I said.
He grew tender. Kissed me on the neck. In the space between my ear and the beginning of my shoulder. I screamed so loud angry I had come. Had allowed myself to be controlled by a stranger, a thin man with a sexy accent and a closet full of women’s clothing.
“Is this what you call BDSM?”
“Maybe I am bi,” he whispered. “Are you?”
By the time he took the blindfold off, I was disoriented. Looking up into something else he had not explained. A mirror on his ceiling. A large magnification mirror on his ceiling. I looked into that mirror, into a ceiling made of my face, a mutt’s face, a face, which reminded me every time I saw it of all I did not know about myself, might never know about myself. That night I looked until I lost all perspective. Didn’t know if I was a subject, his object, or a philosopher queen.
I wanted to be an objective observer, but after those nights with him I didn’t know if it was even possible to be an objective observer.
“You like this,” he whispered in my ear.
I understood this. But did I like it? I didn’t know. Didn’t understand what my body wanted. There was a moment where we both sat facing one another in the middle of his gigantic bed. A moment when clarity hit and the message in my head said leave and never come back. Get up and go. Run. He’s mad like Mama. Made like Mama. Run. Now. I heard that warning voice. And then I watched myself shove all-knowing aside. I reached out for him gave in to the pull of the past.
“Write me a love letter,” I’d begged, him. And her. Words of praise and affection were what I longed to hear. Needed to hear my whole life long. He said he was a writer. Why hadn’t he sent me that letter? And why wouldn’t he answer his fucking door? I’d done everything he’d asked, cooked him pasta, and let him tie me to his bed. Blindfolded in the dark of his bedroom, on a waterbed.
Held down, not only by ropes but by the force of his emptiness.
He never came to the door. He left my red enamel pasta pot on his front step and stayed inside probably watching me on the surveillance cameras he’d installed.
“What will you remember about me?” I’d asked when he’d finally let me go.
“Your face, your hair, your legs, and your breasts. Mainly your legs,” he said. “You have great legs.”
Afterwards I came back to my single room in my shared apartment and began to write, my story, this story, all the stories, not knowing they would become this serialized story, a story about aging out of childhood abuse and trauma.
Hunkered down as the car rattled away from all we had ever known. Mama leaving another man. All of us very poor and very hungry. Mile after mile, the babies wailed, and Mama yelled, letting us all know how we were a burden to her, weighing her down. If only she hadn’t had a pack of kids, if only she’d gotten rid of us.
If only. Now her life was ruined.
Behind her in the backseat I began to rock covering my ears my heart imploding. Didn’t know what to do, or how to help her. I wanted to help, but how could I when I was the problem?! We were her problem: the baby in my lap, the baby on the bench seat beside me, the brother on the floorboards, even her favorite child hugging the door handle weeping. You are all dragging me down, Mama screamed. And I believed her. I am a burden. I have ruined my mother’s life. That is the caption which still floated up into my adult consciousness whenever I felt unwanted, unloved, and alone. Keeping me subservient and obsequious.
Tied down when I need to leave.
Apologetic when I need to scream f*ck you.
I continue to wonder at the force of your spinning this story of daily abuse and abandonment into such a powerful story of resistance and survival. It’s like being inside a haunted kaleidoscope. Even when I know the source images — the damage your abandoning yet grasping mother inflicted on you and your siblings with her endless parade of men — I marvel at how your work continually reconfigures the parts, like a dark symphony of the same notes in different order. I am such a fan because your heart and your artist’s eye make even the hardest story unforgettable. Sending love and mad respect. Honored to witness your reckoning with the hell that made you fight so hard to survive it, and tell about it, ❤️
I sat in my car in my driveway and read this, raced along with your words, holding my breath as you spin, spun this story, this life — I love you, fierce Chris Rice.