Chapter 4 - "Just Go Ahead and Kill Me"

"Man, she's going to kill me for sure" I thought to myself as I walked up the steps to our porch and opened the front door. My heart was racing, and I was feeling nauseated as it had been five days since my mother had brutally attacked me in the kitchen, I knew she was in the kitchen waiting for me, and as I came through the doorway she grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall, hand on my throat. She was visibly upset and said "If you ever, and I mean ever tell another living soul about what goes on in this household I will kill you." she let go of my throat and sat down at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette and I knew that was my opportunity to head to my bedroom. I tried to control my anger as I made my way to my bedroom. I had heard her say that to me so often I did not pay much attention to it. When I was ten years old, I used to say to her face, "why don't you just go ahead and kill me?" and I used to think it to myself sometimes after listening to her berating me, or after a beating, sitting alone in the dark wishing she would just go ahead and kill me. Death, darkness and murderous overtones hung about the walls in our house, no matter which house we lived in. It just followed us wherever we went. I had always felt dead, as though my spirit had been taken from me or split the scene, whichever. I remember the day I actually realized that I felt dead already as it was another bad scene,I was ten years old and there would be no rescuing from this one and no kind words of a compassionate nature. We had moved back to Albuquerque from British Columbia, Canada. We were only in Canada for three months and my brother got busted for possession of marijuana. My parents packed us all up and we moved back to Albuquerque. We moved just two blocks from where I grew up and I continued on at the same elementary school and got to see all of my old friends, and Arlene was still my best friend. A tragedy struck our family that today is a haunting nightmare for me as the truth was not told, lies ensued and the case was not solved. My brother Chesley was killed. Whether it was murder or accident is not known today, although the FBI ruled it an accident and the case was closed. There were witnesses who claimed to know the truth but were not talking. Our family had struggled from the beginning and the case against my parents for child abuse by my brother Rob was already five years old, during this time my parents went to counselling two times and then between social worker visits managed to control themselves for a while. We then moved to Canada and back to New Mexico and were now not in the direct eyes of our case workers. Stress levels were high as my parents could not cope with the death of their son, my mother's health deteriorated. Her mental, emotional and physical health seemed so fragile. My dad had lost his mind and was attempting to "off" himself on a regular basis by running down the freeway in the middle of the night. My brothers Howard and Rob would have to go get him and bring him home and bar him in his own bedroom just to keep him alive. I had become a kind of punching bag. We lived in that house on Indian School Rd from 1973 until 1977, and those were the darkest years of my life. We moved back onto the same street I grew up on, La Veta in 1978. We moved into a rental house right next door to the one my parents sold to move to Canada back in 1972. My mom's anger and abusive behaviour toward me did not slow down once we were back on La Veta and I remember many bad scene's there before Deserie and her family moved onto the block. I thought back to the time when I had eaten something that made me sick and during the night I was choking and I thought I was just choking but I was actually throwing up all over my bed and my mom got mad at me for making too much noise and making a mess and made me sleep in my throw up. I remembered another time when my parents did not seek medical attention for me even though I could not walk for three days, as my nephew had pulled a chair out from under me, and I fell on a huge root that was sticking up out of the ground at a neighborhood bbq. My dad took me home and put me on the couch and went back to the bbq. I thought of the time when my friends Mike and Mark and Michelle were all hanging out in our yard and my dad came home and picked up a cane, a natural growing branch that is smooth and hard like a cane,off of a Spanish broom plant and whipped my legs with it sending me into convulsions. My friends lived across the street and they were used to seeing my parents beating me, but they all took off upon seeing my dad whip me with that cane. I remembered a time when I was very young, not more than six years old because it was before we moved to Vancouver, BC that my dad dragged me by my leg across the living room, and as he was taking me to the bedroom I shared with my sister to whip me with a belt,he dragged me around the corner through the hallway. I was grabbing whatever I could to try to get away and this of course made him more angry and he jerked my hip around the corner of the doorway and I screamed. He threw me on the bed and was beating me with his belt and my brothers came in and got him to stop. I have hip problems to this day. I remembered my brother giving me puffs off a cigar and then I got sick. My mom was cursing everyone and I was only four years old, but I remember because she grabbed me and put soap in my mouth and treated me like it was my fault and that I had chosen to light and smoke a cigar at the age of four by myself, when I did not even know what my brother was doing. She threw me in the bathtub, wet a towel and beat me with it. That I remember. It just went on and on and I wondered what I had done to deserve that kind of treatment. I always used to tell my mom I loved her when I was little but she would never say it back. I eventually stopped saying I loved her at all. She was turning me into herself, little by little, piece by piece. My sister Kathi and I were made to sit at her feet and beg her forgiveness, and to tell her how sorry we were for being so bad, and I was not more than six years old. My mom suffered from manic depression and my dad was diagnosed borderline schizophrenic, but I think they misdiagnosed him because he was definitely schizo paranoid.