Shamelessness. Emotional invincibility. I'm not sure what happened to me, what created this kind of gentle monster, but by the time I was in 9th grade, shame and related feelings that create social conformity were non-existent. Offline from birth, maybe. I am autistic after all. I ran up to my twelve-year-old brother's choir in front of five-hundred people and sang a whole song with him because I knew the lyrics. Four years old. This shamelessness grew teeth after a few nights in jail, handcuffed with false accusations. I learned to chew as a stripper. I learned to walk as I became homeless . . .
I tried so hard in school. Ninety-eighth and nine-nineth percentile standardized test scores. I knew how smart I was. I knew it. I couldn't write anything without ending up bleeding from my fingernails. My father refused to have me diagnosed ADD, PTSD, or abused. I wanted my mother to know that I was as good as her father who walked out on the family to California when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She'd drink and tell me things. My other uncle, he was on a spectrum. He was accepted to Brown after graduating early, then signed himself into Vietnam at nineteen. He was forced to leave his post and be placed in a mental hospital. He couldn't stand seeing mother's babies after they were thrown beneath tank tracks.
My mother, that narcissistic, sociopathic piece of God's trash would tell me all about him. . . She laid with me in bed and said the same thing about my father.
"Weakness runs in families."
That's what his father told him before died. He lost a leg in WWII and they took it fifty years later. Butter and sugar, sugar and alcohol.
I cried to my forth grade teacher so that she would be my mother. I cried to my sixth grade teacher because I had a 2.3 average, and I begged him for the Presidential Award. Straight A's only.
At ten-year-old, I put on a tutu, fishnets and a zombie mask to get some chocolates. I think a lot of people live to see their Halloween costumes come to life. Zombie-stripper again at twenty-three years old. . . forty-four dollars an hour isn't bad for a hospital drop-out.
