REFUSAL

Blog Post 8

Refusal

"I will list the things that I know for sure.

            I was 22. Her duplex apartment was two neighborhoods away from the neighborhood I had just moved out of. Her house was two and a half blocks from my ex’s house. It was across the street from an acquaintance’s house, which I had been to but did not enjoy.

She was my roommate’s manager at the bar .She had been to our house on a number of occasions. She never had invited me to hers. 

She had been to a New Years party at the venue where she worked, but she was not on the clock. She had the night off.

I did not go to that new years party. I was at a different party, at my ex’s house, in the same neighborhood.

They say that she seemed happy when she left the party. They say that at least the last time they saw her, she was happy. They kept saying that.

They could not find her for 36 hours. They checked her apartment last in the search. The windows were open and the door was left unlocked.

She was beaten to death with the wooden baseball bat that she kept near the door. She had not been raped.

That is what all I can remember about the first person I knew who was murdered. I don’t remember much about her. Usually when we talk about her, people say they will never forget what she looks like. I will never remember what she looks like.

But I remember how we mourned her. I helped. My roommate slept in my room in our bed, for a month, unless I would sleep with her in her bed. At first my partner slept in whichever bed was empty, or on the couch, or did not sleep at all. I think he thought he was protecting us. But he had trouble sleeping without me, and within a few days he slept with us too, her against the wall, me in the middle, him on the left side.

The man who did it turned himself in a week after they found her.

At least, he thought he killed her. “I couldn’t really remember, its all confused.” He thinks someone game him PCP or Meth at a different News Years party in some other part of town.

I endured the sleeping arrangement for an intuitively appropriate amount of time. I longed to be able to sleep without anyone touching me. We did this for a whole month before I told them both that I wanted to sleep alone for a while.

She went back to her own room, and he went to Houston, then to Hamburg, then showed up one day, 6 months later, and lived with us again.

That spring I decided that I would never again go to a funeral or a wedding. I would be the one who doesn’t show up. I would play that role for them. My brother made me promise that he could be the only exception to this rule. He was married last Christmas.

I do not go to funerals because it is very difficult to help others mourn publically. I am an expert at consoling privately, but I do not understand the rules of public mourning, and do not know the right things to say about the dead person to their mother. “At least the last time I saw her she was happy”?

In the rare case that I wouldn’t have to talk to the mother, because the mother would not love the person anymore, and so wouldn’t be there to talk to, then I’d at least consider it.

I do remember one death before this actually, that may or may not have been a murder. My parents say he was murdered, but they say the government murdered him and society murdered him and each of us is responsible. Which some days makes sense and other days confuses me.

When I was 4 years old a man came to stay with us named Darrel.

Darrel came to visit us two weeks before he started his key-mo. I knew that it was very serious thing at the hospital. I had been taught how to say it, but did not yet know how to spell. I imagined the operation like someone shining a bright light over your body, so strong the brightness hurt, like a science movie.

He was coming to our house to stay with us because he wanted to spend his last days being happy before the hospital, in case he died there. He did not go to his normal family because they were not a happy family, and we were the happiest family he knew, so he was coming here instead.

I asked what does he look like, because I was afraid that I might have to practice how to react if he looked gross or sickly. I was told he was a big man, bigger than any of the people we knew, the size of a football player. I didn’t know what that meant because I didn’t know any football players, and they were not so big on TV. His skin would be darker than I’d ever seen yet, and the broadest shoulders and a biggest laugh. When I met him I found it all to be true, but sometimes he coughed when he laughed.

My mother even showed me a picture of Darrel, in a room, with a lot of paintings. He looked to be about the size of the paintings. I was suspicious that he might be so big if he was only the size of a painting. I asked how big the paintings were, to test, and was told they were at least ten times as big as me. Bigger than my bed, even. I asked if they were his. She said they were.

Darrel told me once about when he went to a New Years party at Keith Haring’s and he got to meet him! I am not sure whether he told me about this because it was at that party that he got his Aids or whether he got them somewhere else.  He and my father both had Keith Haring shirts.

            When I was an adult, it was confirmed, but as a child I understood intuitively that we were Darrel’s new family. He chose us as his new family because he was in love with my father, who he affectionately called “The Arab”, because my father’s skin has a lot of olives and melanin. Or he called him “Aladdin”. Disney’s Aladdin, which happened in the desert, was my favorite movie. This did not make sense, because my father is from a version of New York but in Venezuela, in South America, which makes money from oil and fruit not carpets.

Darrel was also in love with my “Southern Belle” “Black Sheep” “Prairie-Wasp” mother, the Prairie part made sense. He loved her just because he loved everything that my father loved. He was in love with me because I was the child of (meaning a whole half of) the man who held his unrequited love. If I loved him, it would complete the spell. Happy family. We even had a dog and a kitten.

            During this time, I slept in the painting area of the house with Crayola, the dog, and the kitten, Tyrone, because my parents slept in mine, with Gabe who was one year old, so that Darrel could sleep in theirs.

Darrel was an alcoholic, I knew what that was because my parents were not, but a lot of the people we knew were. I am not sure if it is because he was dying or whether he had that before he started dying.

When he lay in bed, watching the Simpsons (which I was not allowed to watch), and drinking, if the door was open a crack, I would creep in and up, next to him on the bed, and watch. Eventually, I ended up curled on his stomach the way Tyrone does, watching with him, until someone came to tell me it was time for everyone to go to bed.

            When Darrel died a year later, I went to my first funeral. When I saw them lift and set down the big black casket, it reminded me of my whole littler body being raised and lowered by his breathing, and I had an unbearable impulse climb on top of the closed lid, aligning my whole body along the big rounded chest, to and lay there, and watch the Simpsons."