Spontaneous Human Combustion and the Sex Colt Conspiracy

Love, Madness, Pedophilic Sex Cults, Celery, and a Guy Who Burned to Death Alone in the Desert

The hardest part about growing up with a crazy mom was when she’d suddenly decide to get herself killed. Never a warning or a prelude. She’d just go out, find some modern equivalent of a lion, and stick her head in its mouth. If it didn’t bite down fast enough, she’d poke it in the eye for encouragement.

If your mom has never done something like fly to Turkey and disappear for a couple of months because she’s convinced herself that she is in an online relationship with the back-up singer from Wham! you might be surprised how often this kind of thing can happen. And it doesn’t matter how old you are, how equipped you are to handle the situation, or even how normal she seemed mere minutes before. She’s just going to do it. It’s just going to happen. You don’t get to decide when, either.

On this particular occasion, I was still fifteen, only a few months separated from almost killing my stepfather for trying to kill my mother after he found out she’d been sleeping with his brother. I was, you might say, in something of a funk at realizing that I had it within me to kill another human being. Now, she’d decided to die by getting back together with my stepfather, Mike, even though a judge had said they should definitely not do that. Not for money, because he was broke. Not for love, because he hated everything. Not for any good reason that I could fathom at the time.

And, oh God, the argument we had.

The dramatic, hours-long argument.

He’d tried to strangle her, not me, she insisted. She had more right than anyone to hold a grudge and she’d let it go. Stubborn hate was the only reason I could possibly refuse to let him back into our lives. I was being hateful. It was nothing but plain, ugly hatefulness for wanting a man who’d almost murdered her to stay out of our lives. Think of the children! His children. Not my children, she reminded me. Then the common, yet venomous, you are my son not my father. Which she’d had continuous cause to say to me since grade school.¹

Besides, she laughed, who are any of us to judge?

She insisted that she had no idea what had caused him to go crazy that night even though his brother had been sleeping in her bed until the week prior. But no, she wasn’t having sex with him. How could I even suggest such a thing? I was a pervert. What was I doing thinking about my mom having sex? Even though my brother had seen them together, he had it all wrong. They were watching television together, even though there was no television in that room. And also she had a right to be happy so it was fine that she was having sex with Mike’s brother, which again she definitely wasn’t. And also, at the same time, and I know it doesn’t make any sense, she assured me that Mike had never tried to strangle her at all. I’d misheard anything she’d said to the contrary even if it was only a few seconds prior. Back and forth like that, not caring that it didn’t all fit together.

You’re going to have to understand a lot of this was because of severe mental illness. Real bad, for real, mental illness. Her actions didn’t make sense because she couldn’t make them make sense. Her judgement was gone. Vanished in some kind of recurring chemical storm in her brain, like the red spot on Jupiter. When her bipolar winds started to blow, there was nothing to be done. Her ears were deaf to the contradictions of her own mouth.

I didn’t understand that at the time. I kept trying to reason with her like she could be talked out of it.

You’re going to learn at least two very sick but true things by reading this. The first is that a lot of times, when you walk into a domestic violence situation, you’re dealing with two sick people not one.² The second ugly truth was that, at some level, in her crazy mind, my mom had become bored that no one was trying to strangle her to death anymore. Yes, really. She was bored.

Mike’s brother was a crackhead degenerate loser, normally a man right up her alley, but he lacked the passion to kill. He was dull, only looking to get high in the least hectic way possible. Maybe he might steal some of our stuff and pawn it for drugs, as he later did, but he could never be driven to homicide to assert his right to possess my mother as an object. He avoided work at all costs and my mom was a lot of work. She hardly felt alive in that kind of relationship.³

And so, with bruises still on her neck, she argued with me in the street in front of the house as she loaded my little brother and sister into the car.

“Go ahead and get yourself killed. You’re not taking them,” I said, which I thought was very strong and confident and not at all playing into her game. And, of course, I was wrong about both of those things.

No sooner did she load one car seat then I took out the other. I don’t remember the kids thinking this was anything more than a fun game. They were both too young to remember it. At the time, I figured my mom found this bewildering. I was usually the quiet, passive, obedient one. But I wouldn’t stand by and let her just take them like that. Not my kids, whatever she said. Not when I could see the newspaper headline so clearly in my imagination, where Mike killed them all before turning the gun on himself.

My mother accused me of jealously, said I was lashing out by denying the children a fun trip. I denied this vigorously, asked her how in the hell she could think such a thing because I hated very few people in this world and one of them was Mike. And him, I fucking hated in my bones. Looking back, she must have felt like a Pool sharp pretending to be challenged by an amateur. I don’t know if I could have played into her hands any better.

If my relationship with my father is fraught, I don’t even have words for how I feel about my mom. She unbalances me. Writing this has taken four or five times longer than I thought it would. She’s too large a figure in my mind. Too cosmic on the scale of how she has shaped my character.⁴ I’ve learned how to abide my father’s constant low-level bad judgement. Those are mostly physical problems, that you can usually fix with your hands. Like how he broke both a boat and jet ski a couple of weeks ago on Independence Day. I still haven’t learned how to tolerate my mother’s bipolar switches between what feels like genuine motherly concern, and then a few seconds later the craziest, meanest, nastiest shit you’ve ever heard. It feels like being caught in an emotional category five hurricane. A moment will come, you have no way of knowing when, and then the switch flips. She’ll do anything. Say anything. Somehow, she’d even make it feel like it’s all your fault that she did something like go to Disneyland without any money. What kind of son wouldn’t give her all his college funds to feed his little brother and sister? You’re going to keep food out of the mouths of children by being selfish? Twist you all around until you’ve completely forgotten that she was the one that created the situation.

We eventually made a deal. Like I said, looking back, it’s clear as day she was pushing for a specific outcome from the start. She had threatened to bring my brother and sister along precisely because she knew it would make me agree to accompany her. She might have been crazy but she was never without guile. Even gorillas can be cunning.

She wanted me there so my stepfather didn’t get too tempted to strangle her for sleeping with his brother. She wanted him to want to kill her. To almost kill her. She didn’t want him to actually succeed. Not then, anyway.

I suspect there were uglier reasons as well. Revenge, maybe, for the thing she hated most. The way I kept quietly making her aware that she was a horrible mother.

Whether or not she thought of me as a boy, a man, her son, or her father, she figured I could protect her from herself. I could put up a decent fight against Mike if it came to that although our previous scraps hadn’t gone in my favor. In reality, I was a dumb fifteen year old kid, with a giant Charlie Brown head, a peach fuzz mustache, and a whole mess of invisible bruises on my spirit. And that dumb kid was still trying to get his mom to love him, however much I denied it.⁵

Deal struck, the kids stayed at the house and I got into the car with her, effectively taking their place. My mom wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be Jesus,⁶ which I would also have strenuously denied at the time.

We drove for something like nine hours before we finally arrived at the shitty two bedroom apartment where Mike was living. One of those places where you open a back patio door and somehow there’s a freeway right there with no fence between you and high speed traffic. Everything was cheaply made, discount, or secondhand. A place where you couldn’t walk to any businesses because nobody had any business being there, especially companies trying to make a profit. I had no idea how zoning laws had even allowed such a place to be built. If you ever wondered where there wildest kids in your grade school wound up, the ones who couldn’t bring themselves to obey any rule no matter what, it was someplace like that one.

My first thought was that I hadn’t even had time to grab a knife or any other weapon, which I was cursing myself for as we exited the car. It felt like the kind of place you should have that as a simple precaution, let alone when you were going to see your stepfather who’d you already almost killed. I’d had forever to think about it, trying to find an opportunity at a fast food place. None had arrived.

I’d spent the trip fantasizing about digging my thumbs into Mike’s eyes and blinding him, but then it all happened too fast when we actually arrived. There were no knives laying conveniently on the ground. No heavy metal bars. No broken beer bottles. My mom ran up and knocked and we barely had to wait before Mike answered the door.

I wanted some big confrontation, some moment where Mike would look at us with wicked eyes, or confess to the ugliness in his heart, maybe even lunge at my mother. Then I’d have to kill him. Everyone would agree killing him was fair if he did something like that. That was important to me, for it to be fair. For everyone to know that I’d done it fair and square. I waited for him to kick over the first domino, so of course nothing like that happened.

Who am I, really, to accuse my mother of cinematic reasoning?

Mike said hello like he’d seen us only recently, and it was all so mysterious why he was in some place other than his regular home. Before I could speak, he invited us in to view the apartment, and since I couldn’t figure out a way to whip up enough anger to kill him without his participation, I went inside after my mom.

This is the thing people don’t understand about dysfunction, especially when they’re in the middle of it. It’s not like the movies. Movies have clean edges for stories and scenes that start and stop. Even when the director is doing some clever shaky camera thing, to message “this is confusing” even that has a kind of clarity that real life doesn’t. Nobody tells you “this is confusing” in your actual life, you just start looking around not understanding what’s happening. Stories are meant to help pull the audience along, even this one. A really honest dysfunctional story only has motives like “I don’t know, I didn’t think to do any different at the time” or “I didn’t know any better.”

So I walked into that goddamn apartment because I didn’t know any better and couldn’t think of anything different to do at the time.

Mike felt no obligation to acknowledge any of the reasons he was living in a shitty two bedroom apartment in Idaho. I made some angry comments to try to start something but he didn’t take the bait. He did not seem at all concerned at my presence, or the absence of his two children. He wanted to have sex with my mom and so he showed me to the couch, next to his roommate. My mom pushed me in that direction as well, which short-circuited my attempt to force Mike to lay hands on me.

I sat down, in utter defeat. She’d outmaneuvered me. I was numb, hoping for something to let me not be numb. An inciting event that would end with a violent struggle. Deep down, in a place I never acknowledged, where I was still a child waiting for his mother to get better, I waited for my mom to tell me that we were leaving and she’d made a mistake.

That’s the biggest mistake, I made through my life. Waiting. Giving up the initiative. Looking for reasons outside of myself to take action.

While I waited for that something to happen that would make me feel okay about fighting Mike, they went into his room, locked the door, and well… there are reasons I’m a fucked up guy who jokes around too much and has trouble behaving all the time.⁷

There are sacred things in this world. When no one teaches you what they are and explains why they are sacred, it’s hard to understand them as anything other than regular, normal, or even boring. You don’t pause to appreciate or protect them until they’ve been profaned. When that happens, even the harshest atheist feels the chill of evil on their spine. You may not be interested in religion, maybe you dismiss it all as “just stories” but you cannot deny there is a steady pressure in the universe that spun those stories into that shape. Call it selection. Call it group dynamics. Whatever you want. It is a pressure, existing everywhere, forming and refining us in its image across Cosmic Time.

We all feel when that is ineffable thing is violated. A love of beauty, slashed into pieces with a knife. A soft innocence, like the shell of a living nautilus smashed with a hammer, rent open to expose the soft creature inside, and then painfully defiled. So I sat there on a couch as a mother’s love for her child was sacrificed at an altar of garbage. Instinct reversed, as contrary as water running uphill. The way a mother is supposed to want to sacrifice anything for her children, always put her children first, never do anything to harm one of her children, bent into this twisted shape in service of what?

God whispers to us through sacred things, and when those things are broken their absence might as well be the voice of the Devil.

All of this is how I met Billy, the man you likely began reading this piece to learn about. All events previous, only a road that led me there, to that couch next to that strange person. A man who, by all personal reports of the situation, would later die of spontaneous human combustion.

This is ultimately a story about mental illness. It’s a story about people who can pretend they have it together enough to keep a job, like my mom. People like Mike, who have been irreparably damaged by their pasts. And people who can barely keep it together at all, like Billy.⁸

As my mother did her best to salt the ground where my love for her had once bloomed, Billy turned to me on the couch. He was sitting cross-legged and eating a plain piece of celery. Billy was big man, middle-aged, and I was immediately discomforted by his presence and made more uncomfortable by his attention. I found him threatening, despite the too small Red Power Ranger t-shirt he wore that exposed the milky white bottom of his stomach. He was strange person who had no part in a story about me killing someone. He had no place anywhere in anyone’s story. I’ve come to see sanity as a group instinct, an ability for people to coordinate on some central theme. Not cinematic themes, but simple ones based on emotion and motive. I couldn’t figure out what kind of story Billy should inhabit or what future we should inhabit together. Perhaps that was why I didn’t grab a knife out of a kitchen draw, go into Mike’s room, and see what other piece of God I could carve out this Earth.

God, I wanted to for those first few minutes. I wanted to do something awful. I wanted them to feel something as terrible as my humiliation on that couch. My own mother had me something too close to a cuckold for comfort.

After some time, I realized Billy was staring at me and I mumbled a few words of introduction. I didn’t want to talk to him. I correctly sensed that talking to Billy would be like trying to play catch with a still pool of water. Billy was a soft-faced man, balding with a rat-tail, slack-jawed with absent eyes that seemed to dwell on nothing. Yet fear was there, hidden behind his slowness. I can see that now. I believe that if he had been better equipped, he might have never stopped screaming.

I heard sucking sounds, and winced. Then I realized they were coming from Billy, who was licking his fingers after finishing his stick of celery. He was still staring at me. He peered around the room conspiratorially.

“They’re after me, you know,” he whispered.

The one thing I appreciate the most about my childhood, now anyway, is that it kept being differently terrible. I know people with worse childhoods, but mine was uniquely surreal. Or perhaps I managed to be better at identifying the strange elements. Before I had time to really think “oh God, that was traumatic” some new awful thing would happen and not only would it be awful it would be weird. This wasn’t great in some universal sense, but I am horrified to consider the alternatives. No tongue in this cheek, I promise you. The advantage was that the new awful thing was usually horrible enough that it made me forget the previous thing. If there had been one consistent thing that was bad that I had to dwell on all of the time, like a loving family where my mom was sick, that probably would have eaten me up inside. Instead, I just kept having to deal with different weird shit and it made me adaptable.

I wilted like a flower around some magazine I had picked up, barely realizing that I was no longer in the story of my mother’s dysfunction. Billy had rescued me from that murderous story and placed me in his own, against my will.

“Um, sorry. Who’s after you, Billy?” I said, trying to avoid eye contact.

“Them,” Billy said.

He grabbed another piece of celery and dunked it into a nearby jar of peanut butter that he had previously left untouched. He resumed chewing, even as he spoke, like talking around a cigar.

“Mike said you were a smart kid. Do you think you could help me?”

Billy was a beast in size, near my own proportions, if thicker though the waist and belly. It was a bad idea to keep siting there next to him. And there was nowhere else to go.

“Help you with what?” I asked.

“The colts,” he said.

It took a moment to realize he wasn’t talking about horses.

“What cults?” I asked.

“They travel the country, organizing pedophiles to molest children.”⁹

I took a moment to watch him keep eating celery, which he never stopped at any point in our conversation. This is one of those surreal things that I’m talking about. It would be one thing for me to be cornered by a madman. Another for him to talk to you about Satanic Pedophilic Sex Cults. It’s another kind of thing entirely to be cornered by a madman telling you about Pedophilic Sex Cults while he eats a highly unusual amount of celery.

“Wow,” I said.

He shifted on the couch and leaned forward. I thought he was about to fart, but then he pulled a large sheet of paper out from under the cushion. He slammed it down on the cheap coffee table before us. It was covered in crayon scribbles. I realized Billy had crayon underneath his fingernails, too. At some point, the paper had been a map of the United States. It was all but unrecognizable now.

“They started back East, coming over here from Europe. They began by molesting village children until they were chased out West by the Salem Witch Trials.” As he continued to eat the celery with no hands, he had the tone of a college lecturer. Pointing at a tornado-like swirl of blue scribbles over Missouri, Billy said, “That’s them trying to make their way back across the country, to reclaim the East Coast. The Western states aren’t enough for them anymore.”

I closed my eyes and because I was dumb, I asked, “Were you molested as a child, Billy?”

Billy responded by scraping a thick brown arrow over Montana with his fingernail, and muttering under his breath. “They’re after me now. I’ve been looking into them for too long. I’m too close to penetrating their inner sanctum. It’s all here on the map.”

He pulled a short back crayon out of the pocket of his mesh shorts. It took it from him and regarded it for a moment. One end had teeth marks on it. It had been a longer crayon once, before someone bit it in half. And I knew by instinct that if I were to examine Billy’s molars, I would find residue there. Or if it was not there now, I knew it had been there in the past.

“Show me where the rest of them are,” Billy commanded.

For no particular reason, other than that I didn’t want Billy to freak out and kill me, I drew a star over Albany. Billy gasped, and flapped his hands in a manner that was either excited or hostile.

I realized that there actually was one place left for me to go. So I went to the bathroom. For a few hours.

And locked the door.

I took a seat on the toilet, and looked at a few books in a basket by the towels. They were all about Satanism and Witchcraft. I was in there a long time, so of course I also opened the medicine cabinet where I found a bottle with the name “William Something-or-Other” on it, and the medication label was “Thorazine.” I knew the name from a psychology course I had taken at school. It looked unopened. By the prescription date, I guessed that meant it was unused rather than new.

Billy was schizophrenic and off his meds.

Somewhere in the middle of my long exile to the bathroom, Billy knocked on the door and asked if “they” had gotten to me.

I told him I was okay and that I would be out soon.

“I’m going to stand outside the door and wait, to make sure you’re okay,” he replied.

I made a snide comment about that being okay since there was a locked door between us. It’s amazing how much I judged Billy for not being on his meds, rather than a society that allowed a guy who barely had the mental capacity to eat celery to be in charge of his own treatment.

At some point I hummed, but stopped when Billy started to hum with me.

I was in there for an eternity. I don’t know if I thought of anything. I was well practiced as dissociation by that point. I could spend days up in my mind if required.

“Did they get you yet?” he asked, some time later.

And I said no when he started to shake the door handle.

I had been raped, once. Only once. Long ago. It would not happen again.

The shower curtain rod was too awkward and blunt to be a spear. The plunger and toilet brush were too light to be used as clubs. I could probably use the shower curtain rod to break the mirror, and then I could use a piece of the mirror as a knife if I needed. This still seemed like a bad plan. I stood with my foot pressed up against the door as a wedge and simply hoped, since I had not yet learned how to pray.

I heard Mike’s bedroom door open at some point, which gave me two separate kinds of relief. One that my mother was no longer degrading herself, if only because the person she was degrading herself with was too tired to continue. Secondly, because there was a reason to take action again. Witnesses, even if poor ones. I quickly opened the bathroom door, where Billy had apparently been standing for something close to two hours.

I pushed by him, grabbed my mom’s car keys, and told her I’d be waiting in the car. At last I took some initiative and told her that I’d drive home without her if she wasn’t outside in fifteen minutes and I didn’t care if I only had a Learner’s Permit. We drove home that same night.

As a man sitting here writing this, who has talked all of this out and had years to think, I can see everything differently. Obviously, a kid my age had no business getting involved in any of this. My lingering dysfunctional thinking is that I probably should have removed the battery from my mom’s car. She wasn’t smart enough to spot that kind of a problem and even if she did, she wouldn’t have had the know how to put the battery back in place. Instead, I let her set the terms of the game. I gave up the initiative to someone who was in no place to make a good decision. A broken car would have given time for the bug up her ass to die.

Mostly, I should have called my grandmother. My grandfather was dead by this time, and I didn’t want my grandmother to fret, but the shame of it would have stopped my mother right in her tracks. Her parents had been good to her. They had been great parents. Whenever they confronted her, she knew she’d fucked up even if she couldn’t quite connect the dots on how. Lastly, I should have been more open about my mom’s mental health problems. I don’t know if it would have changed much. I don’t know that she ever did anything a judge would take away her freedom for after the storm in her brain quieted down and she could seem normal again, but it would have given me a network of support.

There are four crazy people in this story.

The first is my mom, who could “fake it” enough to hold down a regular job and support herself but still infrequently did things that were totally self-destructive. The first time my wife met her, my mom tried to force open the locked door of a garage and started screaming hysterically at the mechanic inside for screwing her over. Real sudden violent behavior. You would have thought for sure she was psychotic. It didn’t matter when I calmly told her the garage would be opened in five minutes, that the sign was right there on the door and she was a little bit too early. Something had built up in her and had to burst out. She was sane enough to conceal herself to an extent. If she had a set routine, she could be mostly normal. When her industry exited its growth phase, however, she was among the first to be laid off. Over the years of working with someone, you get a sense of what they have going on inside. When cuts have to be made, you have to preserve the best you have for the good of everyone. I would have fired her, too.

She was also sane enough to accept help. You could give her something and it would materially improve her life. My mother could not survive at the level she was living without my grandparents and myself. It took the full-time efforts of three adults to keep her in a house, for instance. She could work and be normal for eight hours a day maybe, but when she came home and that door closed she had to manically spend at least twenty percent more than she’d brought home in a given day. She needed money from myself and my grandmother to cover any deficit. Her father was there to chaperone her relationships, to try to keep the worst of the behavior out as much as he could. When my grandfather died, her relationship got even worse. When my grandmother died, she took more and more money from me. When I left, she lost her home and started to living in a series of apartments.

Madness quiets down in old age, I think. Or at least, that’s been the case for her. A big part of it is that she can’t pull in weird men the way she used to when she was younger. For a few years, she took antidepressants and she was doing really well. Better than she’d ever been. She was steady. The storm in her brain quelled by a chemical balm. Good enough that even my sister, who suffered the worst betrayals, started to talk to her again. I think my mom didn’t like the way they made her remember all those things she did, didn’t like how they made her feel accountable, so she stopped. Now she denies she ever took anything like that. It’s all so odd to her that everyone else remembers this vividly.

When my son was born I told her she had to get help or I was cutting her off. She couldn’t do anything to me she hadn’t already done, but I wasn’t letting her do that stuff around him. I even went to therapy with her, trying to jump start her treatment. She chose her illness. Yet again.

Mike, of course, was nuts. I don’t know what I’d diagnose him with, but a half-Canadian, half-Micronesian islander doesn’t become a white supremacist because everything is firing on all cylinders upstairs. His childhood abuse was horrific and well beyond anything that ever happened to me. At the end of the day, Mike could be normal¹⁰ for an hour or two and that was it. He might be able to play off his eccentricities as jokes, even to himself. But if you put him in a situation where his very survival on the line if he didn’t behave, he still wouldn’t be able to behave. He just couldn’t do it. He might be able to have a job for a few months, but he couldn’t keep one for longer than that. It wasn’t in him. He’s been to prison a handful of times. Most recently for meth. I call him the Negative Millionaire, because he’s consumed over a million dollars of public resources by my reckoning.

And of course, I was crazy. Except I am also very lucky. My crazy took the form of software problems. Stuff you could fix by having better ideas. Learning different behaviors. I get a bit odd if I’ve been working for very long hours, but it’s a slap happy odd and I generally don’t get there until long after most people. I can be totally normal for years at a time. The craziest recent thing that happened to me was a panic attack after my cousin passed away, and crucially, I recognized what was happening and took immediate action to address it. I can self-repair. That’s something that neither my mother or Mike ever had. Maybe one day I’ll self-repair enough to not even need to write anymore.

Billy was crazy to a different degree. You could give him medication, but he wouldn’t remember to take it. My understanding from what I learned after the fact is that he couldn’t keep a job longer than a few weeks or months, and he always found weird situations. He worked for Mike’s brother unloading trucks, mostly for free, and as compensation had been given a room with Mike. That was as much as he could do. He could pick up some boxes and move them from place to place as long as he didn’t have to think too hard and he could do that until all of his brain was used up.

There are jobs where you cycle through the same groups of dysfunctional people over and over again. Shady stuff, paid under the table, and Mike’s brother ran such an operation. It was a shipping company, but I’m pretty sure that was a front for dealing pharmaceutical drugs to pill-poppers. He couldn’t hire normal workers for fear they would ask questions. Billy worked there on and off for several months, and sometimes Mike would give us all updates about what happened to him.

One day, Mike and his brother were laughing about Billy being dead.

He’d totally flipped they said. Claimed to whoever would listen that the Illuminatus were after him. He wasn’t safe anywhere.

Billy taken all the money he had in the world and spent it on camping supplies. Then he’d gone out into the middle of nowhere, to the Idaho grasslands that might as well be deserts, and tried to hide from Pedophilic Sex Wizards. Alone in his tent, he’d burned to death. Spontaneous Human Combustion, they said, laughing about it was such a perfect way to do die for a weird guy like Billy.

I think I found an article about it later, though I can’t find it now. This would have been in the mid-aughts and his name really was Billy if you can find it. Something was in there about a cigarette, but even the sane-washed newspaper article that didn’t mention Billy’s schizophrenia confirmed he had burned alive.

At the time I was stunned at the poetic awfulness of it. It is poetic. It was, in some sense, a perfect way for Billy to have died.

Except now, as man with children, I have the thought I am always forced to feel for such situations. The grown up, adult thought that once upon a time, Billy was somebody’s baby. Then he got sick, and sicker, and nobody stopped it until he was on fire in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

1. In my total defense, she gave me continuous cause to act like her father instead of her son.

2. This isn’t accusatory. Stab wounds leave infections, too. These things have to be treated and they don’t just get better all on their own. In this case, it had also made me sick, although I would have denied it at the time. It made all of us sick.

3. You still don’t believe me? I get that. It sounds like misogyny. To be honest, I struggled with those kinds of feelings for years although only to any woman who was ever kind enough to look at me with affection. How could I not? It hurts your soul to see someone be hurt. To see a woman hurt, even more. But to see your own mother, the person who gave life to you, rush into harm repeatedly? With a single-mindedness where she would not only choose the abuser over you, but harm you in order to aid her abuser? To repeatedly, for years, try to save her despite all of that and for her to laugh at you? To be worn out so you don’t even try to protect her anymore, as long as he’s only hitting her and leaves the kids alone? No one comes out of a home like that totally okay. I didn’t. If you looked over every dumb, stupid, self-destructive thing I’ve ever done in my life, you wouldn’t have to be a lead FBI Profiler to conclude “I think this guy might have some issues with his mom.” Still, I’m right about this. It has persisted across a decade of therapy. In the most peaceful place in my soul, the quiet part that has never lied to me when I’ve had the wisdom and tranquility to listen, it is the only explanation that fits, ugly though it might be. I didn’t believe it until some years later when she got into a fight with Mike and recited, word for word, a speech from the Color Purple including holding up her hand as if to cast a curse. It was all a movie to her. All of her life is like that. A movie, starring her, and everyone else is there for background. And she’s sick and that means it’s not completely her fault, even though she won’t ever get any better but I still love her. I couldn’t ever save her, I couldn’t ever even really help her, she wouldn’t ever try to fix herself, and it’s all just very, tremendously, sad.

4. In the interests of showing my own warts, here is one. I have only ever felt attraction to female celebrities who have domestic violence charges, such as: Hope Solo, Emma Roberts, and Amber Heard. I have no attraction to Lucy Lawless but I do feel attracted to Xena, Warrior Princess. And to be honest, it’s because Xena has killed people and Lucy Lawless hasn’t. Where any wise heart fears to tread, for pretty much all of my early and mid-twenties, my heart only opened up if I could be the ineffective hero to a woman with borderline personality disorder who would clearly rather not be saved, especially by me. And I would have willingly died for any of those women.

5. In my experience, the best therapy feels like “how fucking dare you say that to me!” And it took a long while for this one to sink in. It’s too easy to stare up at the sky and say “What do you mean I have a gaping hole in my chest? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m much too strong for that kind of thing to happen.”

6. I missed the part where the reason Jesus’ sacrifice had meaning precisely because he loved the world and the people in it. I wanted vengeance on the world. I wanted to show everyone I was better. I wanted to throw away the world and spit in the face of its people. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

7. I’m trying to think of anything else ugly about myself that I could confess here but most of it is up in my head. I wrote a lot of really terrible horror stories that were quite popular, and all the ugliness in me probably shows up in things like this. As you might imagine, I don’t have a relationship with my mother anymore.

8. And of course, people like me who stared too long into hell.

9. This was way before QAnon was a thing.

10. Mental illness is best understood as a game of suspicion. Can you convince someone you’re not mentally off? How many someones? For how long? To what extent? That’s what people mean by “normal.” And that’s how this works in the real world, anyway. We self-sort.