Perfect little dollhouses

Jared Karnes [anti@terahertz.net]

Perfect little dollhouses in children’s dreams. Perfect families and Christmas scenes. Perfect lies and bleeding minds, shattered lives and broken sighs. Does childhood exist?

In my case, it’s right now. As much as can be when you’re at college. It’s the only chance I’ve had. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, August 8th of 1982. My father had been an alcoholic for at least ten years already, with many more to go. Life was okay for quite a few years, moving a lot, eventually settling in Manassas, Virginia in a little three-bedroom condo. One room for me, one room for my parents, and one room for all the pornography, alcohol, and drugs. Our third room was called the storage room. I wasn’t allowed in the storage room, the ‘reason’ being that nothing of mine was stored in there.

Simple enough, but a bit of a lie. The beginning of my loss of innocence was initiated in that room.

Personally I think pornography is not art. And there is a big difference between being erotic and being disgusting. The human body is art, and nudity for that purpose is wonderful. Pornography however is smut. And smut that an eight-year-old should not see at that. Hustlers, Playboys, Penthouses littered throughout; not nudity, but filth, radiated about the room. Alas, it never fails that the evil world shall take out its vengeance upon the meek; children are curious sorts.
Life remained pretty wholesome, with the occasional smell of marijuana wafting gently through the apartment, or multiple empty bottles of vodka lying about. Dad was no social drinker mind you, dad was as alcoholic as alcoholic could get. At least a half gallon a day. Dad had been drinking since he was 16, and had also done much more. Homelessness had been achieved multiple times, and hard drugs had been a bit of a novelty to pass the time in earlier years. Dad had cleaned up though. Dad was a dad… wasn’t he?

It was the summer after second grade, and Dad said we needed to get out of the city, so we moved to the middle of nowhere. Front Royal, Virginia, right at the base of Skyline Drive, right in the floodplains where the Shenandoah River forks in half. People actually come from all over the nation every year during autumn to see the leaves change colors. It’s such a beautiful thing. That beauty is a lot of what kept me alive those seven years in that tiny little town. Coupled with the fact that I was born the most stubborn person on the planet.
December 19, 1990, shortly after we moved to Front Royal, my little sister was born. My pride and joy, and the only person that I could not live without. I got to name her: Kristin Noel Karnes. It had a wonderful air of beauty and personality to it. Kristin was a beautiful little child, cheerful, bright mannered, intelligent, and quite oblivious to everything she was being shielded from. Kristin took her first steps to me, her big brother.

When Kristin was born, Dad gave up hard liquor. Instead of a half gallon of vodka a day, it was at least a 24 pack of Milwaukee’s Best a day. I don’t know if it was the chemical difference or just the fact that he was pissed off about having a second kid or what, but this was the beginning of my evolution.

Shortly after Kristin was born, my single room turned into a double, with Kristin’s crib across the room from my bed. I got about as much sleep as mom did, and that was not a good thing. I was never much for school when I was younger. I always seemed to find more interesting subjects to pursue on my own instead of what the school needed me to learn to feel that they were helping me. Though I excelled beyond my peers in English and Science by extreme amounts in class, I was always involved more in reading encyclopaedias and dictionaries at home than doing my homework. My grades were always okay, hovering around lower-average, but It was quite obvious that I wasn’t stupid. When my grades started to truly plummet, due to lack of sleep, Dad decided to move me out of Kristin’s room. He got the ingenious idea to fashion a room out of the basement; a 20x12 foot boat tarp hanging from the ceiling in the remote resemblance of two walls, with the bare cinderblock walls of the basement providing the other two. The rest of the basement consisted of yet another storage area, again, for the smut among other things.

Basements are dark, and cold, and altogether not fun to live in.
Dad loved that 80’s big hair metal shit. Loud and fast had to have been his motto, and he applied it to anything and everything he ever did. From looking at this man, you would not think that he would be of any harm at all. Slim and tall, he stood a swift 6’2”, soaring above my little vertically challenged self. Sunburned from years of construction site supervision, with blotches of ill behaved skin cancer here and there, Dad really didn’t seem like one to be of any significant violence factor. Dad drove fast, drank fast, and was quick to punch you in the chest or throw you across the dinner table if you argued. It’s really hard to love someone like that, but you try so hard. It was Dad, and you were supposed to love Dad no matter what. Even in the Bible it says to cherish and obey your parents, so I did what God said. I tried to cherish, and most certainly obeyed, because frankly it hurt a lot not to.

Dinner is a family time to converse. Dinner is not a family time to watch the oldest child be catapulted across the room because he’d rather not eat at that moment. At least to someone normal it’s not. Broken ceramic plates stuck in your arms are painful, and breaking tables by landing on them isn’t exactly comforting in itself.
We got a dog when Kristin was two or so. I had to prove that I was responsible enough to take care of a pet, so we got the dog as a test, and if I did a good job we could keep it. I was so happy. As silly as it sounds, that animal became my confidant. It was always there to listen when no one else was. It was also there to take out my rage on. Extremely infrequently, though wrong nonetheless, the cycle of violence sparked from my father to me, then from me to the dog. The same beat and apologize method became known to my best friend, much like the relationship between my father and I.
The dog ended up living in the basement with me. Such a wonderful atmosphere; my dog and me… and porn… and the dogs mess, which I could never seem to keep up with. Sometimes I needed a little help, but the only help I ever got was screaming and yelling, and a backhand when I tried to argue my point. I ended up spending a lot of time in that basement, regardless of it’s stench, content, and altogether lack of appeal as a humane living confine. After being thrown down the steps, I was pretty much afraid to go upstairs any time I wasn’t specifically asked to do so. I couldn’t hear the screaming and yelling of my mom and dad, usually about me, quite so clearly through the floor down there anyway. It was comforting. Even more so was the fact that I could build forts and climb inside with a light and read volume upon volume of encyclopaedias and dictionaries and shield myself from Dad. Maybe if I got really smart I could make Dad happy and he wouldn’t hate me so much. He had to hate me. People don’t hit people they don’t hate, right?

He told me he loved me all the time, and Dads don’t lie. They just don’t. Getting thrown down the steps or punched in the face was okay, because Dad always came downstairs afterward and apologized and said he was sorry. Always a tear and a kiss on the forehead. And it was okay, because it was Dad. He didn’t hate me, he loved me, and he told me so. Dads don’t lie.

I was taught that alcoholism was a disease. Okay, a disease. How do you cure a disease? God can cure diseases can’t he? I prayed. I prayed day in and day out for the yelling and the screaming and the mind games and the hitting and poking in the chest and that rank smell of alcohol on Dads breath to stop. I just wanted to be a normal kid and have a normal life and play with friends and have toys and be goofy. I didn’t want to have to try to shield my sister and myself and my mom, even though she was doing all she could to shield all of us herself. I prayed to God, the almighty, my savior, and nothing happened. Nothing stopped, it got worse. The yelling got louder, the screaming got harsher, and the hitting got harder. The pushes got swifter, and the being confined to the basement graduated to being locked outside, or having to clean the bathroom with bleach and a toothbrush whilst battling poison ivy. Bleach and poison ivy is one hell of an annoyingly painful combination, especially when you’re young. About it’s only equivalent is the emotional pain of being backhanded and feeling the sting of the salty tears against the sensitive cheek that was just violated.

It all stopped on the worst day of my life; almost.
Being already broken, tattered, and torn, with tears streaming down my cheeks and pinned up against the door by my neck, Dad cocked back his fist. In essence he was about to put his fist through my face and my head through that basement door, which he surely would have succeeded in had my mother not stepped in. For the first time ever, my mom stopped him. I was so thankful, yet so enraged that she had never done it before. None of it mattered though, not anymore. Dad stormed out of the house and way in the truck, and mom started to pack. In 15 minutes we were on the way to Grandma’s house. How cliché: Into the woods to grandmothers house, and running away from the big bad wolf.

From that day on the physical aspects of my childhood were over, myself left to repair what I could and hide what I couldn’t. All the years of broken glasses and broken dreams were over. I no longer had to worry about being physically punished to extremes or screamed and yelled at during my waking hours. Nightmares, depression and suicidal tendencies consumed the years that followed. Constant violent mood swings and horrible dreams reliving old experiences and creating new ones plagued me constantly. Always putting forth the contented front, I suffered inside more than anyone, including myself ever knew.

Multiple suicide attempts always ended not working to the fullest extent, or being foiled. Around the age of 13 I can recall one distinct time of holding a razor blade in my left hand, preparing to cut my right wrist, pondering my last solemn, calm thoughts of life and death. Sitting there proving to myself that beyond a reasonable doubt that this would solve everything. ‘When I’m dead, I won’t feel anything.’ As I apply pressure to the blade and it starts to break the skin, my little sister walks in the door I neglected to lock, staring me straight in the eyes. She had no idea what was going on, but she knew something was wrong. I could tell it in her eyes, and she could see it in mine. And I was bleeding. I was in total shock. I sat there staring into that little girls big beautiful brown eyes for what seemed like an eternity. The little girl that I named by myself just years earlier. The same little girl that trusted me enough that she took her first steps toward me. I sat there and shed a few tears of joy at my little diamond as she just stood there in the doorway with a puzzled look on her cute face. After a few minutes I calmly got up off the floor, went to the bathroom, took a shower and aided my wounds. There was no way I could go on without that child, or that she could go on with out me. After that day, I could never live a second without knowing that Kristin was okay, and until the day I die, I will be by her side, physically or not, always.

A few months after my mother left my father, we found a small trailer in a small town called Highview, West Virginia. Highview is a very beautiful small town just across the West Virginia line, about half an hour from Winchester. At the time my mother was working at Kroger, a grocery store in Winchester, Virginia, managing the video and cosmetics departments. Still being a student of Warren County Public Schools, I had to get up extremely early every morning to be driven to my old bus stop where I would catch the bus as usual, so as not to arise suspicion.

During Mom’s long hours at work, supporting her two children on her own for the first time, she met a man named David, who at the time worked for Orkin Pest Control. My mother and Dave became close quickly, and Dave eventually moved in with us. Shortly thereafter, we ended up getting a house in Front Royal, on the other side of town from where my family had originally lived. My emotional problems continued straight through the two years we lived in that particular house, much to the family’s disappointment. After problems with the landlord regarding the ownership of the house, we settled into a small, pleasant tempered trailer park just outside of Winchester. It was here, in this little trailer park that I decided to start life over again.

After being to multiple doctors; psychologists and psychiatrists, being on multiple mind and mood altering drugs, and having multiple takes on why all this shit happened to me, I gave up. I didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Continuous self-loathing tears you apart. You always put on the front to make everything seem okay, to seem happy, when in reality you’re eating yourself alive inside every second of your life. For years I had lived with the happy front while going to school, being out in public, etc. People rarely questioned my happiness, and always assumed that I was in wonderful spirits because of my willingness to help others. Very few people ever knew about what had happened to me in the past or what was tearing me up at that point in time; even the ones that did got a good look at the front I provided to shelter myself.

After a while you seem to forget why you even hate yourself and just remember that you are supposed to do it.

I finally let it all go; all the hits and screams and shrieks and shoves, all channeled up and out. I decided I didn’t want to be a walking zombie anymore. I was not happy, and had never truly been. It was something I had always wanted to try, much like having always wanted to go to a particular country. I changed myself. It took no drugs, no doctors, and nothing but my own determination to be happy. I decided that what happened was not the best thing that could have been, but that it had made me who I was. And I loved who I was. I love my personality and my thoughts and my ways, everything. This new outlook on life gave me the chance to change my perspective on reality. No longer was everything a huge void because my life started out hell, but the void was filled and covered with new exciting experiences and thoughts previously ignored. I started to enjoy life, and notice the little things that make it worth everything in the world. The sentimental names, the tiny steps, even the leaves changing colors. There aren’t many people that can honestly say that they love themselves.

Maybe what happened to me was a gift. A harsh gift, but a gift of life. True life, free of falsities and misconceptions, because what I have, I truly appreciate.

“It can’t rain all the time..”

-jk-