One Billion Rising: “Kicked Out” A Tale of Survival from Alysia Angel pt.3

So with this post we’re gonna wrap up our three part serial from Alysia Angel for the One Billion Rising campaign this week. If you’ve enjoyed reading Alysia’s work, please feel free to pop over to her superb blog HERE which is regularly updated with her awesome writing. The story which we have re-published here is also part of an amazing anthology called KICKED OUT, which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and is available for purchase in both book and e-reader forms. You can check out the book and get more info on the ideas behind Kicked Out HERE as well.

A deep, heartfelt thanks to Alysia for having the courage to share these stories with the world, and to you for reading them. Hopefully you were able to take something away from all this for the better. Peace!

-Goonie

The last time I ran was in Waco, Texas.

I was raped once while hitchhiking. A young man with big heavy metal hair picked me up, his face smiling and open. I thought I could be weary in his beat up truck and tell him of a friend’s house to take me. He seemed safe to me, so young and in my social circle of people, a kind of cousin of my punk family. In the late 80’s and 90’s in Dallas, Texas, there were not a lot of “freaks” like us so solidarity was important for numbers against the “norms”. Or so I thought.

He pulled off into some woods and my heart sank. He forced me into the truck bed and yanked off my panties. He put his hand over my mouth, although he didn’t really need to. No one could hear me and I knew it. I don’t remember much of what happened then. I can remember tracing the letters of PANFUCKINGTERA, the smell of sweat and rust, the way that the moon peeked through the fingers of the trees as though it was too ashamed to show itself. I can remember him looking away as he put my panties back on my shaking body and how he drove me to my destination in silence.

I walked into the house and collapsed. My knees folded like the hinge of a switchblade. I remember words like “rape” and “call the police” and then “no”. That was from me. My sweet friend Ted would draw me in geometry class with his talented hand. My friend Ted would love me with his eyes and nothing else. My friend Ted who gave me some of his boxers and a tee shirt to wear and held me sobbing in his bed, his body carefully away from me until I finally was able to sleep. My friend Ted was my hero.

I crept out the next morning after writing Ted a letter. I only saw him a couple of times since then and it was from a distance, his velvet brown eyes searching me. I didn’t have the strength to approach him but he seemed to understand.

After nearly a year of being on the streets and somehow still attending high school, somehow for a spell, holding down a job at the Burger King, and that last little stint with my father, I finally turned myself in to the juvenile delinquent center. I was exhausted and I had started sleeping behind my high school in the woods. Once I got to the detention center and they realized I didn’t belong there, very kind guard named Chantesse arrange for me to go to a shelter instead.

The shelter had a lot of rules and everyone had chores. We mostly watched television and paced like tigers in the small paddock they had outside for “free time”. It was a 12×12 concrete slab with chain link around it. You could see White Rock Lake through the links in the fence and the water looked like obsidian at night. I would run my fingers along the fence on the water line and dream of being rich and having a boat to sail on that water. During this time I took up smoking cloves for no other reason but because I needed something to do with my hands that constantly itched to cut to gain control.

I also covertly held hands with Vanessa. We watched each other a lot. Our eyes courted each other because nothing else could. Vanessa had long walnut colored hair down to her waist like armor. While we watched television together, I would watch her curl it all the way up with her finger and then let it slowly slide out again. Her thick body that was always in boxer stance, her feet apart, and her elbows tightly at her sides hypnotized me. She was always ready. I wanted her in ways I had never wanted anything. Something about her live wire of her energy and the way she looked at me in the glow of the street lights outside of our dorm window made my heart feel like a jackhammer and my skin like an instrument poised for playing.

One of the attendees of the shelter would creep into the girls sleeping area and wake us all up by touching our faces and singing songs about how he was going to come in our assholes, mouths, and even our noses in Spanish. He warned us that if we told anyone about his morning activities, he would make sure that we were written up and sent to juvie.  He would stroke himself while we all lay in our beds very still and then he would whistle out of the room to go wake the boys up. We all laughed it off at the time, calling him a creepy pervert, but I could see that we all bowed our bodies inward more, our irises sliding into the corners of our eyes more. We were taking no chances in there and we had each other’s backs. One of the girls in the room had been molested by her father and immediately put in the shelter by the police. Her pain was so acute she would have terrible nightmares of him coming into the room. I could feel each of us awake in the night like teenage sentinels as the nocturnal fighting eased up and her breathing became regular again. Horror was all around us and there was not much to distract us from it.

The shelter only allows for youth to stay for 30 days and so at the end of my 30 days my grandmother came to collect me. I stayed with her for a while, her watching my every move with frantic tension.  It was a prison too but a well-intentioned one. Living with your grandmother as a punk teenager is hard. One day you will get an idea to check out a Ouija board and maybe in that moment candles sound perfect to have while you do it. Additionally, perhaps listening to Yaz will feel like the most apt background music in the world. Your very sheltered grandmother might have other ideas of what this scene might look like. I woke up in the late morning to find that I was completely locked in the house. She had bars on every single door, window, and even the skylights. She had taken all of the keys and all of the phones and had not left a note. I had no idea what was happening and so for many hours I just paced the house looking for a way out.  My grandmother arrived with my aunt and uncle and they started to pack my things. No one said a word to me and when I would ask what was happening, they would not answer. In the car they finally told me that the devil worshiping was a last straw. I was stunned. I laughed. I tried to explain what I had been up to and it fell on deaf ears. The drive was a long one as the morning stretched itself into a very hot day.

They had decided to put me in a home for wayward children. As it happened, it was the exact place that my very young mother had dumped my brother and me off at when I was four and he was two. I recognized it immediately and my heart froze thinking about the foster system and the constant packing up of barely anything to go to the next family that didn’t give a shit. I was too dulled at that point to be shocked and allowed myself to be led through the orientation and into my new room with my bovine-eyed roommate.

It wasn’t so bad, the home. My roommate was young, unhappy, and small. She said very little and asked about as much. Alternately, the house parents were very kind and loving. They, like most of the other people at Methodist Home in Waco, Texas, worked there because they wanted to make a difference. These people actually liked kids. I got regular therapy and I went to the local high school on a bus with the other kids like me. The regular kids buzzed about us, lingering in hallways to point us out. I was especially something to talk about with my punk garb and my mohawk. I also didn’t care. I had perfected this wall of least resistance. I didn’t fight and I also didn’t join in. I just floated. I made good grades. I kept to myself.

Right before my 16th birthday I got a letter from my aunt Ellen. In the letter she did not wish me a happy birthday. She did not say kind things. Instead she berated me for being who I was. She disparaged my way of dressing and called me names. She said I was an embarrassment to the family and that she was ashamed to call me her niece. I read that letter many times over. I read it until the paper grew soft in my hands from wear. I read it until my heart became a poisonous thing. My family, the adults who were supposed to protect me from harm had not only forsaken me but now somehow, they were saying that it was my fault.  I had reached my limit.

I ran from that place but not before my sweet step-mother showed up with one of her funky homemade birthday cakes. I spent my 16th birthday with her and I am grateful for it and her. I ran right after though, because I needed to feel the running. I needed to know the escape. I ran because I needed no rules and no letters and I needed my community of kicked out runaway punks. I ran because the feeling of wind in my lungs felt joyous and exciting.

I spent the next year couch surfing, riding trains, protesting injustice, laughing with my head thrown back, and using pliers to yank off my braces. In that year I grew my hair out some and signed up for beauty school. Somehow with my grandmother’s generosity and money from the job I had outside of beauty school, I was able to get little apartment. I was just barely 17.

For many months I would move to the sofa from my bed, or a few times I would sleep wrapped in a blanket under my kitchen table. I had (have) a lot of nightmares. I still sometimes sleep on the sofa for comfort and this goes back to my much younger years when I would sleep there in hopes to escape the nightly visits of my father.  I am proud to say that this is very infrequent.

I did a lot of drugs to escape during this time since I didn’t have running to ride the waves of anymore.  I did have moments of clarity in the pot haze of my late teens turned almost twenty. Little pin pricks of knowledge started puncturing my fragile existence. It would not be until my mid twenties that I actually started to do the work I needed to lay foundation for healing but having a home of my own was the brick.  Having security that I built and fostered myself, however non-conventional, was just enough of a spark to light the desire for wholeness and healing inside of me.

It was enough to start a revolution, to expose the shame, and to be dangerous.

I still feel dangerous now, at 38 just by writing this. I feel dangerous sharing it online. A million misgivings rush at me. What if my family reads it? What if they are ashamed? What if it outs them as negligent? What if people misunderstand my need to finally write all of this out for the first time in my life? What if they feel shame to know me?

Why am I still protecting everyone else after all of these years? Why do I still feel shame? Why does anyone else like me feel shame? Why are we afraid to tell our truths? Why is there no space for us?

Why is all of this still happening every single day?

What are we going to do about it?