Creaks

My body creaks a thousand beats per second, devouring itself like a kaleidoscope. Colors of memory ripping through miserable moments of high school expectations. My seething hatred for the despicable institution of high school is a fire free transforming, beating bodies to ash. Like a revolving can packager with glitches and drops, I have traveled from high schools desperately seeking solace from my refusal to submit to anyone’s expectations. My eye lid has been ripped off in order to see how they want me to behave. But I am a tyrant, I am difficult, and I always put up a fight. The bad seed, the kindergarten white girl pouting amongst rows of contented Mexican kids. White latex gloves stuff their poison fingers down throat sore with screaming for relief from the ultimate slaughter of the human soul.

My first week as a freshmen at Hollywood High School led me to the college counseling office, its walls covered with posters of East Coast women’s colleges with ivy covered brick buildings, and independent looking women sitting under trees in idyllic pastures. Those images weaved themselves in my mind like glowing brooks, hot with electricity in my ever distant future. In the cool expanse of the school library (dust rested in every corner) my mind wrapped her around willow trees and gothic archways. That’s where I wanted to be.

The winded pounded her above my head in chains, pounding away with grief for the love of freedom. Frizzy red hair, orange tights, lace-up granny boots, and a prairie girl frock. I had this vision coming into high school that I would be some neo-Victorian princess with a parasol romping around the clinical school building, phantoms on my mind.

I am writing to affirm that all my past of irreverent teardrops coffin winding evenings was more than a waking nightmare. I am a hot springs of germinating memory and emotion.

Top building, in the biology classroom. A Friday afternoon above the Hollywood traffic, above exhaust and sunken mystery hovering above the kinky sex shops and the blind tourists.

Sun stained musings of how the scene kids would spent their Friday night. The anti-war slogans I would wear on my cheek, the petitions I would ask people to sign to veganize school lunches. My dance class, choral class, and school musical, all left me feeling invisible.

The catwalk above, that dark attic-like place above the school auditorium witness to the sweat and politics of decades of school productions. The haunting presence of carved professions of love in the wooden pillars.
The scene kids ignored me when I tried to befriend them, so I sat alone and read Charles de Lint. I was so fascinated by their hair, clothes, and effortlessly snobbish cool way of carrying themselves.

So it seems that my mind is cracking and all my thorny branch experiences poke their nasty heads though my insides. Through the high schools, the mental hospitals, and the hellish nights my mother and I would tear at each others skin until it burned and scared. The way I tried to suffocate myself under my blankets until I knew that I was loved. And so these thorns still prick, and I walk around freezing without a mask. The times I ran away from home and the police came looking for me. Officer Green handcuffed me called me a bitch; he threw me in the back seat of the police car. I was 15 years old.

One day in middle school, I realized something was wrong with me. All the cool artsy kids could mingle and be free, while I was ashamed and locked away. My drama teacher didn’t think I could be an actress. I went to Kaiser with my mom to make a request for some anti-depressants. The doctor that did my intake decided that I was a threat to myself when I refused to take a memory test. I left the Kaiser that day in an ambulance, beyond my own mothers will, off to the mental institution. As I waited to be taken away, my mom gave me a tissue from her purse. Really, am I really going back there? In my mind’s eye I was taken away in a mechanical claw that scurried way into darkness.

The next day I was supposed to go to Universal Studious with my mom and brother. Maybe I can be I happy, I thought. Maybe a day trip with my “family” could be pleasant for once, and erase all the times that ended in tears and arguments. I used to have this beautiful dream of my whole family (My mom, dad, and brother) going to Disneyland together, and everyone being happy. As a 13 year old, I obsessed over the perfect birthday trip to Disneyland. I would watch Pinocchio and my heart would swell at its magic beauty. I cried because I thought I was too old to have Mickey Mouse bring me a birthday cake, and because I didn’t have any friends to give pretty party favor bags to. “When there's a smile in your heart, there's no better time to start…”

In the first grade I sat around Ms. Podiack table with the other students, listening to her lecture on the difference between “them” and “they”. Her silver teacher’s bell sat right in front of me. Her words drained out of my mind and all I could think about was what would happen if I rang the bell. I rang the bell, and quickly darted my eyes down. “Mary Ann!” exclaimed Ms. Podiack in disdain.

When I was 13 eating in a Thai restaurant with my father, he told me I looked like Pretty Baby in my lipstick and floppy knit hat. My adolescence was filled with references to disturbing art films which painted the landscape of my mind with dreadful precipices and shadowed corners. My dad would tell me stories about the children in foreign countries that were in the sex-slave industry. He said they were placed in the rivers and eaten by leeches. He told of the prostitutes that had their babies aborted with coat hangers in seedy whore house rooms.

He casually mentioned a porno of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves he had once seen. I tried to imagine what that would look like. In the 70’s, my dad and his drag queen friends were driving wildly through Hollywood with the ashes of their recently deceased queen friend packed up in an urn. Those ashes went flying out the window when they took sharp turn. I went vegetarian at 8 years old, after he told me about the process of slaughter. He told me countless times, of how after my mother gave birth to my brother, she was stitched up with a need and thread through excruciating cries of pain.

During the last semester I spent at Hollywood High, I put my soul a dance to the song Lilli’s in Ridley Scott’s “Legend”. My dance teacher gave me a curt glance with her beady eyes; no acknowledgment. The same lack of acknowledgment was carried into my current AP Language class. The teacher and the students are so conditioned to stupidity that they don’t even recognize my existence. That’s because the only language they understand is that of mundane, acceptable, beige plastic box ways of thinking. I’m “that-one maniac-depressive -lesbian -redhead -radical feminist -animal rights fanatic.” I say things in class discussions that make everybody uncomfortable. Too long I have been overlooked, repressed with radical, passionate ideas.

“What ever will I do?” whispered the trembling shadow-stained maiden to the blue jay. Paper dolls trip over themselves in the blinding light and here I am with my paints, paper, and orchestra moaning under my bed piled high with yesterday’s frazzled attempt at the avant-garde. Every wise reaching young woman must have an angel at her back. Especially the ones who know what they want, but are adhering the steps society has provided. The dishes pile as the maiden’s heart doubles over with electricity as CD's and absent slips fling themselves about the room. She is so clever, such an enigma, yet she is collecting dust, this fascinating otherworldly doll. Touch her and she will crack.

To think that I could write ceaselessly until the film over time and memory is completely ripped and sea water can ripple through irradiate rainbows of gasoline sitting on my mind. Spinning ceaselessly, the moment is soaked in cheap wine, skipping through dusty pages. Outer consolation is nothing but a brush of silver leaf on rotting skin, a brush of candy on lips that are burning. Paint one every wound I ever felt. Cuts, scrapes, and stitches. I would never dare slice the marks that I wrote. Breath so quick and self-pitying as my heart trollops down my spine; nausea envelopes me once again. Disgusting to think of dating a boy, of being desired by a boy. My ravenous desire for female flesh turns itself frantically on the tip of my tongue; so sore, so sore.

The sky is iron dusty darkness. There is a single street lamp, neon in its imperceptible screeching. A boy comes to dinner; in a zombie like timbre his awkward remarks mingle with my mother’s lucid wild eyes. I don’t want a phallic caress reaching down my neck. Bloodshot eyes, your entire life is that bulge in his pants. In the scratchiness of a stark white gown I wear, an itch climbs up my leg and my slow rhythmic bleeding that whisks away my spirit like the softest whipped cream melting with a cry.

Itching pain swimming through my veins. Rose red venom plummeting slithering divine, scintillating hysteria. I need to scream and wail until my bones my weak with the fieriness of rushing light. I take my witches brew of being by the horns, bubbling with dried roses, beats of a synthesizer, a harpist’s touch, antique pages faerie-pressed rain stained, a failed ballerina. Ghostly voices chase me up the winding black stairwell creaking with the swell of cracked time. You ask me what’s wrong, and what am I to say? I have dreamed of mermaids singing, tasted the luscious fruits of goblin vendors, all I could buy with a lock of hair. I cut all my hair for more, but the goblins are no where no be found. I pine away, a spoiled child, craving her song that shatters demons, the plum juice that runs from her lips.