THE BONE COLLECTOR PT. I: THE BEGINNING
Crystal ruined my life before I was even born.
My father started the affair when he was seventeen, fresh out of a coma. He fell off of a wall and fractured his skull, it took a few years before he could walk, talk and taste again. I suppose that one accident changed everything. Maybe he died and came back to life, but he stopped giving a fuck. Some people come back from the dead to love, some people come back from the dead wishin’ they stayed dead.
I would be born ten years later out of lust, the lack of a condom or a conscience. It was the eighties, everyone was doing drugs and fucking like it was the end of the world. This was before AIDS, Reagan was in office and nothing really came out of the Love Generation except a bunch of burned out hippies.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug, expensive and the high doesn’t last that long. It was a designer drug, so then there came speed for a couple day’s worth of what cocaine couldn’t do. Cheap yellow thrills. Smoke it, snort it, eat it, inject it. You can do anything on speed.
I’m not sure when my Daddy started cooking but I know I was conceived under her influence. Crystal made him leave every woman he ever loved. She wasn’t his girlfriend, wife, or lover but she had him under his spell. If he made a whole lot, she’d bring him money, pussy, all the time in the world.
But she fucked me over so bad.
Not only did I not have a father, I had half siblings scattered around Los Angeles County, apartments with labs instead of cribs, an abusive step-mother, she even later would take my friends from me in high school and send a few to jail, a few to the grave.
Being raised by a bunch of toothless degenerate strangers who stuffed me into bags, backed me into corners, made me hide from their shadows in the witching hours. I should be dead too. How I survived I don’t understand. Sometimes I wish I was, like I’ll be standing and the wind will blow a certain direction and I can smell the chemicals that used to be the air I breathed as a child. It’s like a kick in the face from Death himself, handing me my blackened lungs and scattered brain along the lines my Daddy used to snort.
When I was eleven or so, my father went missing for a few days. This was nothing new, but for some reason his girlfriend was real freaked out. This was after a few busts and hotel labs, so she took all three of my dad’s kids and booked it to some shithole apartment in the Valley, to her girlfriend’s house. I think her name was Shirley and she had a kid my age named Ashley. Convinced the cops were watching the house, they swore they could see a car video recording us, they were probably high as shit, they decided to smuggle us out of the apartment. Except they didn’t want the Feds to know it was us, so what did these fucking tweakers do? They made me tape my tits down with duct tape, tie my long blonde hair up and stuff it in a baseball cap and for the rest of the day I was dressed like a boy, except I had just gotten my period that year and I was a girl. I started to cry but was slapped from the front seat. That day I learned how to cry on the inside, where nobody could see or hurt me again.
Looking back as an adult, that blinking red light in the car across the street was probably a car alarm.
The hospital called us later that night. My dad was in the burn unit at St. Joe’s. A lab exploded on him in Tujunga and he had third degree burns on his right arm, from his shoulder to his fingertips. He was also going through chemo that time. We were entering the end times with Crystal. She was going to be the death of him. He started dying again.
You ever seen a grown ass man looking like a skeleton under the pale lights of a hospital? You ever smell death? His skin was sliding off his bones, bandages seeping with puss and plasma and blood. He had been a drug addict for so long, there wasn’t enough morphine in the world to keep him calm. The disease and violence could no longer be detained behind closed doors or kept quiet with secrets. He literally blew up.
It took weeks for him to recover. I would watch the doctor scrape his skin off with a q-tip, I could smell him smoking that shit with the door closed, his girlfriend cleaning the house with a toothbrush blasting Metallica. I still can’t listen to “Enter Sandman” without feeling nauseous. The Black Albulm, for our blackest times.
He wasn’t the same stranger I knew. He wouldn’t stop cooking or using. Everyone left him and then he went to jail again. And again. When he got out the last time he would only be alive for maybe a year before he had his last dance with Crystal, their last swan song.
He died at forty one. His eyes open, looking up to heaven. We took what was left of his bones and burned them up, throwing them into the ocean, where he could settle with the salt of all our tears.
(to be continued)
