literature

The Conductor.homelife.

Deviation Actions

RUNNrabbitRUNN's avatar
Published:
1.5K Views

Literature Text

HOMELIFE

Sleepily, I dunked my head beneath the surface of steaming water. The hot bath water felt like satin against my nervous skin. I came back up soundlessly and relaxed back against the old porcelain tub.

It was one of those old bathtubs that had those ball-claw feet on it, iron beneath... or lead. I could never remember. Nice but tremendously old and rusting in places. The bathroom was coated in this pistachio/avocado green color that kind of made me want to wretch. Looked a bit like pea soup, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Smelled like baby powder no matter what was going on in there. I think the scent had been steam-driven into the walls and floors. I suppose there were worse things it could smell like.

My mind felt hazy. I hadn’t been able to sleep after the nightmare I’d had about school and the new shrink. The dream had left me feeling rather uneasy and apprehensive about seeing Damian again, and I wondered how I could get out of my next appointment on Monday. And yet, the thought of not seeing the weirdo again scared and depressed me just as well. Stupid emotions. Sometimes wish they would piss off for a while.

I draped the wash cloth over my face and sighed in dismay. Maybe I was losing my grip on things, I thought. With my eyes closed, Damian’s eyes quickly became vivid against my eyelids, as if the image had been burned there. I pulled the cloth down some and stared at the stained particle board tiles in the ceiling instead.

On the other side of the wall from me, I heard Grandma in her room, laying on her bed she hardly got up from. She was starting up again.

“Beloved mighty I AM Presence! Enfold me now in my mighty, magic electronic tube of ascended masters' light substance! Make it so powerful that no human creation can pass through! See that it keeps me invisible, invincible, and invulnerable to everything but thy almighty perfection, and infinitely and divinely sensitive to thee and thy devine perfection, beloved mighty I AM Presence!”

I rolled my eyes. Her hissing was worse today.

Grandma was vehemently rushing through another course of ‘decreeing’ from her queer I AM activities book, which I always felt was some kind of thinly veiled verbal attack against me. Like she was trying to curse me or something. Her Beloved Jesus and Saint Germain might’ve frowned at how much rage was in her while she chanted these inane pieces of tripe. And it always increased in volume the moment I stepped into the house, or anywhere near her. After four years of this type of hatred, and figuring finally that it was a bunch of cultish claptrap, I just didn’t have the strength to care anymore.

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, my grandmother and I might’ve had a very nice relationship. She was my Grandma after all. A nice old lady who wore these mumu type dresses she sewed on an old Singer Sewing machine, cloudy blue eyes like Miss Cathy, sagging skin obscuring rather handsome European features. She used to make these sandwiches out of white bread, Best Foods Mayo, Tillamook cheddar and dill pickles that I affectionately gave the name ‘Grandma Sammiches’ to. She drove a little grey VW Beetle with white interior. Our family had a thing for Volkswagen Beetles, at one point Grandma, Mom and Aunt Stella each had one.

I’m sure there were other things that were lovely about Grandma, but, unfortunately, for the life of me I can’t remember them anymore.

She’d tried for many of my formative years to teach me the ways of her weird religion, which was some kind of off-shoot of Christianity and Catholicism with the edit of the Crucifixion and the advent of actual presences that ruled over and protected you. Like ghosts, angels or something like that. I remember something about the “Great White Brotherhood,” which sounded extremely racist to me, and looking at the pictures these people drew of their ‘masters,’ that was easy enough to believe. Jesus was always white with blond hair and blue eyes. Germain was too. Like no other race could ‘ascend’ or whatever. Emphasis on purples and yellows and light blues and a massive dislike for any dark color, believing them the devil’s colors I guess.

No matter how hard she tried though, none of it ever sunk in to me. I couldn’t get my head around anything so vigorously against a color! I mean, I would get a box of crayons and she’d yank the black and brown and red ones from it and pitch ‘em in the waste basket! What the hell?!The minute I came home with red sneakers when I was nine, I was branded a demon-child and her dismay with me only deepened after that.

I hate the color lavender now, and yellow as well, because of all of that. Never thought that such once nice colors could be shrouded in such weird anger. That religions color wheel was dementedly cheery and anyone who would deny that the primary color in life was the color red–as in blood–was definitely not working with a full deck. Anyway, that was what I thought.

“SWEEP THE VIOLET FLAME THROUGH ME! Almighty I AM! SWEEP THE VIOLET FLAME THROUGH THEM! Give Thy Command! SWEEP THE VIOLET FLAME THROUGH THEM!  Increase It each hour! SWEEP THE VIOLET FLAME THROUGH ME! Love, Wisdom, and Power!” On and on and on like some fucked up record. She was pretty worked up this time. Probably because I was in the room next to her doing whatever ungodly thing I do when I’m alone. I wondered if she were frothing now on her worn out lavender mumu.

I decided that it was useless to enjoy my bath any further and quickly finished up rinsing my hair of conditioner. I didn’t even pause with the toiletries, just grabbed what I thought I needed and, shrouded in a pair of sweats, I slipped quickly to the back of the house where my little crypt was.

Though her voracious ‘decrees’ had all but lost their edge verbally now, the absolute loathing in her voice still cut me rather deeply. I never did anything to hurt her in my life, never wanted to gain her dislike or anything like that. I just became myself; a dark, slightly twisted, freaky looking teenager into things she would never understand. Even blood didn’t mean a thing beyond my appearance. So I gave up a long time ago. And I suppose she did as well.

Back in my room, back in my jeans and t-shirt, I kicked back on my tiny twin bed, to watch The Cartoon Network, leaving Grandma to wind herself up into a fainting frenzy in her room on the other side of the house.

We’d been living with Grandma off and on my entire life. Mom would try to strike out, make a living for us somewhere. Along the way, she’d fail somehow and we’d have to land back here with Grandma in the run-down two bedroom bungalow on Mentor Street. It was apparently a pattern. I wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t occurred to me around the last time things went wrong.

The last time, Mom had gone bankrupt with a huge three credit card debt and a home mortgage in the Valley that she couldn’t afford even when she’d bought the thing with an acquaintance several years before. Except for the house, it was almost exactly the same thing five years before. Credit debt and another lost job.

Mom had grown ill in the past couple of years, hypertension and depression getting the better of her. She’d been hospitalized twice with severally high blood pressure while I struggled in middle school. She was never good at taking care of herself and just trying to make enough to feed us both was practically killing her. I had pretty much become the mom, taking care of her instead as early as eight years old. When she worked nights, I stayed home alone with the doors locked tight and an aluminum ski pole my father had given me with a birthday present of skis one year, for protection. Needless to say, I spent a lot of my adolescent years paranoid and terrified.

When the proverbial shit had finally hit the fan last time, Mom was extremely ill and about to be hospitalized once more, and she asked Grandma for help, to put us up and watch after me. I still remember sitting in the back of Grandma’s little Beetle, picking at the disintegrating white vinyl interior, Mom in the passenger seat trying to keep from throwing up, and hearing Grandma say, “you can come stay with me. But she can’t!” Like a dagger in my heart. The final rejection.

Subsequently, I spent a month with my father in Orange County, sleeping on a tiny couch and spending more and more days and nights by myself. I don’t think he knew what to do with me either, tell you the truth. And my brother, who was older than me by five years, was already an angsty miserable teen and I’m sure he despised me just for being a little sister.

Pretty neat, to be so severely misunderstood and disliked that you’re unwanted by all manner of family at the age of thirteen. I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on or why. I still don’t. I just know that it was about the worst year of my life.

Eventually, Grandma had to let me come back, my Mom and Aunt somehow convinced her. But it only reinforced her extreme disapproval of me. I became the bane in her existence and that chanting nonsense became her sword and shield against little me.

Thankfully, I was allowed my own room which was nothing more than a glorified closet with windows off the kitchen in the back of the house. It was originally called a ‘breakfast room,’ but was no bigger than a jail cell really. I made it home though, crammed it to the ceiling with music, books, videos and a word processor which became useless once I accidently formatted the format floppy disk. I had a small twin bed on the floor and at the foot of that a small color tv that actually had cable. Pictures on the walls of bands and albums. The windows blacked out as much as possible.

I didn’t leave my room but to go to school, use the bathroom (tiptoeing through the house to avoid Grandma or the sick mom) and get something to eat. Appreciatively, being off the kitchen allowed me to do that easily.

The neighborhood we lived in might once have been a lovely little suburban town, I suppose. But it had quickly declined into gangland and ghetto territory. I spent a lot of the night listening through the windows for burglars and murderers while clutching my only weapon, a Coleman Colt .22 BB Gun. Another thing my father had given me. I figure he was trying make up for not being there with these things.

During all of the nastiness with being home alone at night for years, bankruptcy and mom’s illnesses, I became an extremely nervous person. When I could, I would lift Xanax from the Grandma’s stash, when she was out, and steal gin and vodka from mom’s decanters. Vodka went pretty well with Dr. Pepper I found out. At one point, I managed to sneak some into a personal little water bottle that I hid behind the left stereo speaker in my room. I wonder if she ever knew I watered down her booze because of that.

Most of the time, I would just watch tv, write stupid angry poetry, listen to music and write one of my only friends Dru, who was like a sister to me, more like blood than any of my family was, and who also unfortunately lived thousands of miles away from me in South Dakota. I’d get a bit wasted before I slept if I felt bad enough and if I really felt horrible, I would take a razor blade from my Grandpa’s old shaving kit to my left arm. I smoked in there but kept it to a minimum to keep from incurring the wrath of mom and Grandma.

Lying on my bed, staring at Cow and Chicken with the Big Red Guy, I still felt strange and high-strung. After the bath, two little blue pills and a shot of vodka, I still felt like I was in some kind of major danger.  

It might’ve been because of the Caleb matter. After all, I was afraid of the cops coming to talk to me about the vandalism of Caleb’s car. I could just imagine it...

Two of the cities finest corrupted law enforcers knocking on the front door, to ask me what I knew about four slashed tires on the convertible of their Alma Mater’s star tackle, already knowing full well that I’d been the culprit. A trip downtown and into juvy would follow. My mom’s disappointment. Grandma’s further abhorrence and disgust of me. A newer world of shit. And I could only wait for the chop of the axe.

But no one ever came. The entire weekend, not one single call or visitor. I felt I’d somehow dodged a serious bullet, and breathed a sigh of relief.

I also had a weird feeling about Damian, a kind of dreading ominous feeling. What he’d done was almost as serious as what I’d done. He threatened blackmail on a student to save my ass. And he did it without a second thought as to those consequences. It bothered me in that, if he knew what the jocks were up to, how much more did he know about the rest of the student body, myself included, and how far would he go with it.

And that whole dream about him. Where in hell did that come from?!

And yet, every single time I thought about him, about those piercing eyes and that almost malignant demeanor behind that omniscient smile, I felt kind of giddy and joyous. That anticipatory delight that one gets when buying drugs or professing love for the first time. It was as intoxicating as the vodka and a lot more amusing in a way. I’d think about him just to feel the shockwave of anxiety roll through my chest.

Which is when it occurred to me, maybe I was developing some kind of crush on him. It was possible, I thought, seeing as I liked him and I did trust him more than anyone else in the world. But he was kind of like a teacher! And that shit was just too sick and weird to me! Anything between students and faculty creeped me out.

Cow and Chicken ended and Space Ghost Coast To Coast came on. I tapped out another blue Xanax from it’s hiding bottle of aspirin and swallowed it with a swig of vodka-laced Dr. Pepper. Maybe if I downed enough mind-altering chemicals, maybe I could sleep. I laid back into my pillow and hugged my stuffed dog Raffles to my chest.

Damian was a strange guy. He put himself on the line for me. He gave me chills up my spine. He drove me nervous even.

Still, when I closed my eyes, I saw his face clearly. And I couldn’t help but smile warmly.
yeah this is essentially what it was like for me growing up. i hate this chapter. enjoy.
..edits done... and a bit more fluffing. i still hate it though. love damian but hate the truth of this.
---
The Conductor part one: [link]
part two Lunch Hour Blues: [link]
part three Death Wishes: [link]
part four White Flag: [link]
part five Homelife: [link]
part six Morning: [link]
part seven Fear Itself: [link]
part eight Wounds: [link]
part nine Cleansed By Fire part a: [link]
part ten Cleansed By Fire part b: [link]
part eleven Missing: [link]
part twelve Mahler: [link]
part thirteen Deliverance: [link]
part fourteen Quiet: [link]
part fifteen Hangman's Jury: [link]
part sixteen March To Gallows: [link]
Part seventeen Conducting: [link]
part eighteen Nostalgia Sake: [link]
----
the religion i refer to in this is actually real and as creepy as i remember it being.
© 2008 - 2024 RUNNrabbitRUNN
Comments13
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Ghost-Dreamer's avatar
Wow, very descriptive, it keeps on dragging you in further and further and love it how you slowly introduce the various participants and make them come to life.

I know those I Am nutters first hand, wanted to convert me years back when I was a traveller in the alternative religions / cults / beliefs circuit; scary bunch. I'm really sorry that you had to go through all that, but really glad you turned out normal after all :)

Great writing as always Rabbit, sorry for the lack of comments overall but I'm up to my eyeballs in work :hug: