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aleatoryalarmalligator · 8 years ago

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Life Story -twelve.

I was not the only person with a weird family. In her own way, Sarah-Mae had a strange family as well. Her mother was sane. Her father had gone crazy and was rarely ever in her life. There were many times when she would think he was coming to see her, even for a few hours on a Friday, and she would wait and be very hurt when he never arrived. After awhile, she just kind of shut that side of her off.

Sarah's great grandmother had schizophrenia. Her mother's father had developed multiple personalities, her uncle Gary had schizophrenia. And I think there were others in her family that I am not remembering. Schizophrenia runs very hard in Sarah's family line. It would make someone very weary of having children, in fear that they might be the eneemeeneemineemo that ended up with it. Another one of her uncles was in prison. And none of her cousins lived with their parents because their parents were not stable or mentally well and couldn't be counted on to raise children. And the remainders of the family either weren't biological, or, even if they were sane, there was something slightly shell shocked about them. Sarah's mother Carol had a very harsh childhood, but I will not ever divulge that information out in the open. She was mostly a high spirited person when I first knew her, but sometimes she seemed kind of closed off and fearful. If you knew her life though, you could understand that she was doing very well for herself all things considered. You don't get out of life, particularly some lives without some scars and unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Carol was cool though, in that you could tell that she had a level of decency in her, even to people who hadn't been very nice to her, including my father who had cheated on her when they knew each other when they were young. She was also very sensitive, and despite her kind of unrealistic favoritism of her daughter, and the fact that compared to Sarah-Mae, I was loud, clumsy and inappropriate (I am not particularly loud, clumsy or inappropriate but compared to Sarah most people are), she let me stay the night just about whenever I wanted to. She included me in their family quite a bit, and I don't think she would have done that if she had not grown to care about me as a person. And if you have read the previous history I have written so far, you will know that I dearly needed that healthy element in my life. She also always shared her food with me every night I came over to visit. And she wasn't rich at all. It was usually just soup, toast, chicken, or occasionally something else. But I have to look back at all the things she helped me with, all the stability she gave me in my bleak little life. She wasn't particularly helpful in anything super personal, but she gave me a place I could go, and later when I was running from my father, she was willing to go toe to toe with him if need be. I don't know if there is anything that I could ever do to make us even.

I would often go with Sarah to her grandma's (her mother's mother) and her grandpa – who was only her grandpa by marriage but Sarah considered him her grandpa just the same, whom she called Grampy. Everyone called her grandma, Tutu, which is 'grandma' in Hawaiian. She wasn't ethnically Hawaiian, she had just lived there for awhile. People might have thought that was a little strange, but as a child I had called my mom – mother, and my grandma – grandmother in full. Which is kind of weird also. When I first met Sarah-Mae her grandparents lived in this big place on a hill above the town. The house itself wasn't very big, but they had these huge bunker type storage sheds that were enormous. I assume they must have had some function at one time for farming equipment. If you had been there, the place kind of stuck out in your mind, They had two dogs, Bernie and Lily. I think Lily was one of those race hounds, I think she was even related to some world record holding canines, but she herself was a goofy sort, very fat in the body but with a thin longish face that was always a little too eager to see you. The other dog was Bernie – now that I am aware of Bernie Sanders, I realize that the name Bernie has been replaced in my mind by the political figure, but before Bernie Sanders, there was a kind of grumpy sheep dog named Bernie who laid around all day.

Grampy was kind of a laid back fellow. He didn't say much, and as he got older he had trouble hearing very well. He was (actually, he's very old but he still alive, so /is) a WW2 war hero. He was one of the original frogmen. Basically, this meant he was a combat swimmer, trained to swim several miles into an enemies area, plant a bomb, and then swim away without anyone seeing him and getting away on time before the thing blew. He had killed people in the war. His knowledge of bombs ended up getting him a career in places where they needed to bomb areas of hillside in places like Hawaii where they needed to build roads. My father knew him clear back when my dad was a teenager dating Sarah's mom, and he said that Bob was the kind of man that would pick up an entire fridge on his back – back when fridges were very heavy, and move it where it needed to be. He was intimidating. But for as long as I have known Grampy, he was always old. He carries Tabasco sauce in his shirt pocket in case he wants to put it on his food. When I first met him, he cooked the best creamy – lemon fish I had ever tasted (this was back when I wasn't vegan – and though I should proclaim to dislike the taste I will admit that at one time I ate all manner of meat and I really especially liked Trout, I shall not lie to my readers).

We would sometimes all go up there to play croquet on the hillside like English people might. It was always quite windy out there. Tutu was/and is a sort of phony individual. It's not that she is dislikable, it's just that you learn to just say to yourself, “well, that's Tutu,” an awful lot. She was always curating everything. You'd think she was some kind of socialite millionaire based on certain personality traits that seemed like what you might find from a socialite woman from the 50's. Which was strange in a way, because nobody else in the family was really that way. Tutu was always very personally driven, liked to gossip, seemed lively. She kept a very clean house. And she was catty as hell. I can't even figure out how a person could just be like that 24/7. I sometimes for fun later on in my life would play cards with her, and I would make one snide comment, and she would fucking floor me with an absolutely cunning and biting comeback, that was oddly ladylike at the same time. In this way, I kind f admired her and saw her snappy resourceful wit kind of bad ass.

But, if she thought what you were wearing was bad, she made note of it. If you gained a few pounds, she noticed, and she would say something – preferably in the most inappropriate time at a dinner table of family members. In a way, there was something kind of wrong with her for this. It was like she was always taking little jabs at other people, but all in some kind of jolly civility that made you vulnerable and her far from it. And here you knew that her first husband lost his mind, and her sons were out of it. And Carol was her sensitive daughter that she scarcely even appreciated most of the time. It was all a bit off. It was good for me to have these people in my life as well though, because it balanced the all too real uncivilized emotional outbursts and disorganized anger of my own family.

Tutu made light of my weight a lot – and always took note of what I put on my plate and how much. Perhaps it was her influence that made Carol compare me to her own daughter early on the years previous the day we wanted those identical shirts for picture day. I don't know really. But after awhile, with Tutu at least, after the initial shock and hurt feelings, you just learned to ignore her. She was kind of like 3CPO from Star Wars. She just said stuff that was a lot of times fluff, and you just kind of shut off her banter in your mind.

The family also owned some land up by this god awful small misfortunate town far from civilization called Winchester. It's mostly known because it's near a wolf conservation area. There is also a halfway house and a loony bin. A lot of people who are running from the law go there to hide. There seemed to be a lot of house fires up there. It's a place where a hermit might go to get their groceries. And actually, there has been a lot of verifiable legitimate UFO sightings in that remote area. Sarah's family owned some acres up there. It seemed like quite a large area that they owned to me. You could go walking for a few hours around the property. Even though I have been there a number of times, I could not find it on a map if my life depended on it. You go through the crazy little town which is mostly tents and campers, then you go on a road that goes onto another more gravely road, and then another gravely road, and then you randomly take a turn into this long road into the forest, and you end up in this strange makeshift junkyard turned campground.

They built this neat little upstairs-downstairs camper, with a kiln and an outhouse. Sarah's uncle with schizophrenia, Gary lived up there alone most of the time, just him and whatever pet he happened to have. There were neighboring horses and cows that sometimes wandered around. They became used to people and were mostly very friendly. Sarah's favorite thing in the world up there is the hammocks. They have these hammocks set up and we used to sit in them and draw pictures for hours. Occasionally, some demented alien version of a wasp would try to attack you, but other than that it was always pretty nice. There was also this pond area where you could catch as many frogs as you wanted. Gary, being alone up there all the time, had set up his own home. It was a school bus that he had gutted out, took out the seats, and put in furniture. It was actually really neat.

It was around this time that I took a special trip with my father to the Sawtooth Mountains. My uncle Bob, my uncle Steve, and my father had all been avid mountain climbers in their youth. They decided to get back into it together by planning a trip to backpack up the Sawtooth Mountains in southern Idaho. My dad let me come along. He knew that I could keep up. I have unusually defined leg muscles. Particularly my calves. The lower half of my legs could have been drawn by Robert Crumb. I have very strong legs, and to get to school I had to walk up a hill everyday. Thanks to that evil relentless gym teacher from third grade, I have very high tolerance to muscle fatigue.

The Sawtooth Mountains are lovely. I think I read somewhere that they are the most photographed peaks in the United States. Idaho is a very jagged state. I don't really think about it because I live here, but the rocks are all jagged, the trees are jagged, even the leaves are pebbles are unusually jagged. When I have visited the east coast, it really shocks me that the leaves are round, the rocks seems old and rounded off. The Appalachian Mountains are like an old boot kind of.

We stopped in the town of Stanley before going on our trip. We ordered food at a diner. I remember I ordered shrimp. Later we started our climb. It was all very lovely, shockingly so. There was a place where we looked out and the sun was hitting the rocks in such a way that it almost had a rainbowesque quality to it. We went about five miles, and then it started to rain – very hard. My uncle Bob buys only the very finest of camping gear, and somehow he had a tent that would completely stay dry inside, even though the ground at that point was basically mud. As I sat in there, and we got settled, I started to feel sick. Never order seafood in an small inland mountain town. Actually, don't order seafood at all – it's killing our oceans, but if you are going to for your own sake I suggest you get it at a sea port, and don't get it in a town like Stanley Idaho. I had food poisoning.

It had stopped raining and I was just about to throw up. I remember my uncle Bob kept making jokes about it. He kept singing 'Ring of Fire' by Johnny Cash, and replaced 'fell' with 'puked' since we were sitting around the campfire. It made me feel even sicker. He eventually offered a sleeping pill he had as a prescription. It was something very heavy that they would only give in a surgical type situation. I don't know why he had it, but he offered me one, promising that I would fall asleep almost immediately and sleep it off. I didn't believe him. I took it and just laid there. I remember I was listening to my uncle Bob talk about a man he knew who fought in Viet Nam, and while he had been there the soldiers had gotten this monkey addicted to cigarettes for fun. And then I completely conked out.

When I woke up the next morning, the nausea was completely gone, and I realized we had camped next to a lake. There was this jagged peak across the lake. It was all very mythical. There were these mountain leeches in the water. I had never seen leeches before.

My radio was always on at this point. I was so obsessed with my boombox. I had named it Raichu, after the evolved Pikachu, and it had a Raichu sticker on it. In the winter, I would always eagerly listen to the radio to hear if any school was getting canceled. It was the joy of my existence if they stated that the Kendrick- Juliaetta schools were closed. It made my life. I was also starting to take horoscopes pretty seriously, and I would get up especially early just to hear what mine would be. Technically, I am a Virgo, but I am kind of in a cuspy area. So in horoscope lingo, that means I shares some traits with Leo. So I always had amusement for myself in mixing the two weekly fortunes together to come up with my own interpretation with what it all meant. Of course, these days I really see no science behind this. I kind of understand the validity of Meyers Briggs Typology, since there are statistic studies you can do with what personality types make the most money, get into certain careers, find themselves in relationships, and who tends to get together the most frequently. All of that tends to be very quantifiable to a degree, even if it's true that there is a lot more to a person than this one way of dividing them up by their tendencies. There is some truth to that test. Horoscopes on the other hand are completely absurd, invented before we had a real understanding of our solar system.

I remember too, one night I woke up, and for some reason they were playing Radiohead's 'Creep'. It was a popular song six or seven years previous, and didn't get much air play anymore. I had never given it a good listen. It was almost as though someone had woke me up just to hear this song in it's entirely in the middle of the night. There was something about that song that got deep inside of me in that moment. I think I even teared up a little. I suppose it might have been the lyrics, but it actually almost felt like the song itself was some kind of key to something else, something I didn't quite understand. I stored that song deep into my psyche that night, and remembered the strange feelings I picked up off of it.

The end of 6th grade had finally come. I almost didn't pass. Mr. Webb, Mr. Wilcoxon, Mr. Gilson, and Mrs. Mathison all took me into a room and strongly discussed that they were 50/50 on holding me back another year. They almost didn't even let me go on the end of the year field trip. I begged with them and I promised that I would do better. I really didn't want my friends to go off to junior high while I stayed behind with the class below me, a class with no one I could relate to. It would have been hell if they had kept me. They eventually let me go along with my friends to 7th, rather than make me stay with the mean spirited little brats in the class below.

Two events happened with other girls on the last month of my being a full time student at the elementary school. One, I remember walking down the walkway one day that lead to the playground and this very popular girl in my class was chasing after Kevin (boy that Sarah and Samantha used to invest a lot of time obsessing over). When Teal passed me, she turned over and shoved me as hard as she could. I fell on my back, the wind knocked out of me. It was hard to fully fathom why she would have done such a thing. It was kind of like she was saying 'HE'S MINE AND YOU ARE A LOSER!', but I cannot be certain. And I possibly will never know. In any case what I might feel like telling her know, but have no real body language to express it is, 'nobody is anybody's and in the end we all lose. And that's okay.'

The second thing that I remember was that there was one particular popular girl who was kind of weird. Her name was Melissa Boyer. She was small, the smallest girl in the class, had giant blue eyes and blonde hair. Sarah-Mae always thought she looked a little bit like Ducky from 'The Land Before Time'. She was extremely popular, but she didn't seem to be that way because she followed the crowd. She was kind of edgy for a 6th grader. All the boys liked her, and she seemed to control everyone, in a way that seemed like she was half bored. Like she had something on people that they didn't even know. She got good grades, not because she cared, but because it was easy. And she might just as easily smoke a cigarette or date a boy three years older. She was just pretending to be friends with everyone else. I don't know. I had always gotten really weird vibes from her, like she knew what was in my head or something. She always looked at me funny, like she knew something was up. She just kind of figured people out. I am smarter than average, at least in some areas, but compared to her, I felt sluggish, dopey, overly fearful, and weak.

She infiltrated my friends one day. Samantha and Sarah were sort of excited that for whatever reason Melissa had decided to join our group. They still held out hopes of being popular maybe in the future, and Melissa coming into the picture was a promising step. I don't remember how it happened exactly, but she quickly started controlling Samantha and Sarah. And she got them to go after me in five minutes of being in the group. She started encouraging them to pick on me and start picking me to pieces. So they started doing this, exactly like she persuaded them to. Not that they didn't fling the occasional insult at me before, but this was not like them to start screaming and hollering at me and calling me names like I was a small town bank thief about to get hung. She had them throwing rocks at me and saying stuff they never would say. Their eyes were mindless. All while they were mindlessly brought to this strange crowdlike hysteria against me, Melissa stared into my eyes amused and knowingly – like this was all intentionally aimed at me, but for what I didn't know. I felt hurt by this situation, but also extremely confused.

After this episode. She walked away. Samantha and Sarah tried to follow, but she brushed them off and went back to her normal group. Samantha went about her business like nothing had happened, almost unaware of what had just happened. Sarah seemed to slow down a little and look at the ground. She felt really confused by what had just happened, I could tell. She came up to me and apologized profusely. She didn't normally apologize for things she said or did, but there was something about that entire event that was really out of the norm, and Sarah always had a very strong relationship with her mom in the sense that, if she became self aware that she had hurt someone badly, she could feel her mother's scorn.

Having been the recipient to this entire event, it left me with a lot to think about. It really made me realize some things about human nature. People have buttons. If the right person knows how to influence other people in the right way, it can have dangerous consequences. And most of the time, adults or children are being brainwashed to say or do or believe things to be true, without even being self aware half the time. It was kind of my Lord of the Flies moment.

If you want to read my life story so far, here are the previous parts.

PART 11 - http://tinyurl.com/yc9qhj84

PART 10 - http://tinyurl.com/yb734w24

PART 9 - http://tinyurl.com/yc2t6vfw

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

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