I think it important to point out that surely I have driven all the way around the longest block and am reapproaching an old destination in a new different car.
He was 47 when this all began. I am 46 now, driving quickly to the house of 47. He is exactly 30 years older than me. As I approach 47, I can’t even fathom being attracted to a 17 year old, much less going forward toward a real relationship.
It will continue to be a heavy weight on me to know that I wasn’t the only one. I don’t even know if I was the first. I think so? I think I unlocked some kind of floodgate. I feel guilt for that.
It is no strange thing that as I approach the age he was when we met that I would take a magnifying glass over the whole situation and see it with new eyes.
I started working on weekends at the beginning. I’ll never forget that, on my first day, I sucked a hamster up with the shop vac while cleaning out the hamster cage of soiled pine shavings. I was horrified and knew I would be fired right away. Not knowing how a shop vac works, I thought surely the hamster had passed through some kind of airbade and was now in a hundred bloody pieces. I went and got the manager (not Joe) and he laughed and showed me that when you take the top off, the hamster is there in a pile of shavings and unharmed.
I don’t think that I felt anything for Joe right away. I couldn’t tell you when that started to enter the picture or even why. I just don’t know. I know he seemed to pay special attention to me just a couple of weeks into me being there. Of course, any attention from someone in power was important to me.
I had been trained to do what men told me to do and to curry favor as much as possible. My grandfather told me while he was molesting me that I was lucky to have these experiences with him and not “some lil’ ol’ BOY.” He bought me barbie dolls and sweets afterward. My stepfather was a source of severe beatings if we so much as stepped too hard on the floor of the pier and beam house while he was sleeping. I was completely trained by the age of 10 that men rule and we simply have to live in their world.
But i wanted more. I wanted power. I wanted to feel like I could make the world shake with the glare of my eyes. I was still filled with rage that I had watched my mother get the living shit beat out of her regularly, even though I didn’t live in that house anymore. I was filled with guilt that my little brother’s tender body had been thrown against walls in front of me and that my mother just said “oh Mike, stop that” when my stepfather touched my budding breasts or between my legs while we rough-housed.
It suffices to say that I felt like an adult. In my mind, I was a full grown adult at 17. I had already helped raise children by the time i was 8, getting up with infants in the night while my mom drank. My sister’s first steps were toward me and it is one of the proudest moments and memories in my life. And my grandfather had told me i was grown-up enough to do special things with him since I was 4 or 5.
I was an adult. End of story. Now i just had to get through high school and out from under my very protective father’s thumb. I loved him and my stepmother deeply. But I argued that they didn’t know me because they weren’t there for all the trauma i had had before i met them. I had tried to be the innocent sweet girl they needed, but I felt like a jaded old animal inside already.
So enter a 47 year old man and his attention. I was fucking hooked right away.
There were touches on my waist. There were grazes of his arm across my small breast as he brushed past me. There were barely hidden sexual remarks and plenty of compliments to my looks. It exhilarated me and drove me. Like a tank on a mission.
I thought i was a tank, but now I know I was just a girl in a 1980 Chevy Citation with desperate goals to get so far above what I had been through that i would set my sights on the most outlandish of things. I set my sights on Joe, because I already knew he had his sights on me. This was going to be easy.
Scarlet Pearl 