My Life of Crime: A Memoir of Survival

chapter one

I got the book in secret, a difficult thing to do in 1976. There was no Amazon, internet, kindle. I don’t remember us ever going to a bookstore. I couldn’t tell you where one was in New Bedford.

Maybe I stole it from the library. Probably not. I didn’t start shoplifting until I was 12. I was 10, still wearing red, white, and blue shorts. You know. 1976 (1776), the bicentenial?

A halter top. I didn’t care about my hair, a greasy short pixie cut that I only washed half the time in brown muddy bath water at the very end of my bath — when the water was cool and gritty. The soap and lather stuck to the edges in a dark brown slime.

No one cared about the tub. or my hair.

My father might have bought it for me. His glassy, stoned eyes hidden behind amber lensed aviator glasses. handing me a $10 bill, letting me run into the mall while he sat in the front bucket seat of his white cutlass supreme — a car he was devilishly proud of and I couldn’t understand why. It was part of that cool perosna. carefully curated. The sideburns, the cigarettes, the aviator glasses, the weed.

(I was a weed. A dandilion. I thought I was a legitimate beauty, a real flower. But i wasn’t.)

I must have bought it (the book)with my dad. I would have carried back out to the cutlass, my dad waiting even more stoned than before. Singing along to eric clapton and that Massachusetts sun, orange setting massachusetts summer. It would have cast a lovely light — I could see it for myself and my father was enjoyin it. I would have sat there while he started the engine. I would have felt my heart burst, hot blood pushing through my veins. Terror.

It would have been hot, my bare back exposed from the halter top, a searing butn against the black leather bucket seat.

“Got what you wanted?” he’d ask.

I would have held it up, Charle’s manson’s demonic eyes tearing through the cover, cursing us both. He wouldn’t flinch, smile, grimace. He wasn’t seeing. he wasn’t listening. He was blind to me and what meaning I might possess in the exestiential equation of our family.

I mean nothing. I was a weed.

Charlie Manson. Those terrifying black eyes.

“murderous Minds.”

“Hmmm.” my fahter might have exhaled. “Well all right.” he’d light a cigarette and put the car in reverse.

I hid it from my mother. Not that she would have disapproved. She would have loved it, devoured it. She had been the one to educate me on the psychopathic mind of a killer. “It’s the sadism,” she’d tell me, “The God Damned sadism.” She told me about of the killers in Capote’s In Cold Blood. Dick Hicklock. He was the worst. She almost had sympathy for Perry, the other killer. He was sort of a side kick. It was Dick that my mother fixated on. It was the irony of one of the murders. The moment before, and this of course was what Capote had surmised. After the girl was killed, after he started writing the story. Reading the crime reports, viewing the crime scene photographs. Capote posited that maybe the boy had asked not to get blood on the wood working project he was making for his sister.

By 13 I was smoking cigarettes with my mother, getting high behind the Freindly’s resturant. I hadn’t had sex yet but that was not far away.

We all smoked. Mom, dad, me. My sister and brother did not. My parents and I lived behind the scrim of cigarette smoke. Our world was void of innocence. No place for a child.

My mother would have read Murderous Minds with me, immersed herself in the photographs of crime scenes, dead bodies, 1960s class portraits of young girls. Frozen in black and white. Youthful. Dead.

It was summer. Swealtoring humid in Massachusetts. I crawled under my bed. the green mind carpet underneath me. Under this bed, a twin Sears maple stained canopy bed is where I did everything. It was the only place I existed. It had a heart and lungs and that space breathed with me. It kept my secrets in the form of a loose leave pile of paper — a diary — written in that dim light under the bed. Stuffed into the box spring through a rip in the mesh fabric. I did everything under the bed. Masturbated. Wrote short stories and poems. Hid from my father and read Murderous Minds. My fingers sticky, sweaty from the heat and terror.

(To be continued)