Finding Life While Getting High on Death.
{Photo credit: Jen Young}
When I was growing up, a bully lived down the block from me. He was adopted, and his parents were hoarders.
He once whipped my best friend with a telephone cord after he couldn’t find her in a game of hide-and-seek. He once threw a skateboard at my brother’s head. He once choked me after I shorted him a nickel at his lemonade stand. One time I even saw him choke — and kill — a frog in front of me.
Once, when I went I went exploring at the creek, I found at least 20 dead frogs beneath the bridge, all of their heads had been cut off, and I immediately knew that the bully did it.
Admittedly, even as a child, I knew that I was oddly attracted to his darkness and his danger. I wasn’t really attracted to him, though, but to something in him. Perhaps it was that his intensity bordered on the edge of explosion. Perhaps it was the mystery of his ineffable sadness.
***
For many years, I dated the former bullies of the world, and not the mean ones, the destructive ones. When I broke up with my high school boyfriend two weeks before prom, he drunkenly called me at two in the morning and threatened to kill himself unless I would go to prom with him. I did not go to prom with him, and he is still alive.
In my twenties, I got engaged to a guy who — unbeknownst to me — stole cash daily from the register at the bookstore he’d worked at for 10 years. And then there was the welder who, on our third date, told me that he believed he would die of liver failure. So I moved in with him.
Red flags are those juicy peaches I want to get sloppy drunk with, make out with, and then, in a series of sweet but impulsively borderline-insane decisions, self-destruct with. People who desire destruction and eroticize death do so because danger makes this life feel all the more glittery, bubbly, and sparkly.
And I have a special radar for dark, psycho-sexual madness.
***
I met my husband, K, during the Texas heatwave of 2011.
I was on an upward trend. I was sober, down to two three cigarettes a day, and the idea of a non-codependent relationship was appealing.
While I felt there was a darkness burrowed somewhere deep in K, I figured that it was something he’d come to terms with, or that he’d left it in his twenties, or that he’d successfully integrated into his healthy self, like through art, or something like that.
K was a migrant farmer. He’d picked apples in Wisconsin, blueberries in Maine, and he’d de-tasseled corn in Iowa. He had a huge beard, wore overalls, and wore his long hair in pigtails. On the road, he’d stop at the basketball courts of small Midwestern towns.
No one suspected a dirty hippie migrant farm-worker had just freebased cocaine in his car, nor did they suspect that he could actually play ball; in fact, he’d played in college. So he made extra money on the side swindling unsuspecting teenagers.
In November, we moved in together into a big old house in the south Dallas ghetto.
***
We had a bit of a raccoon problem in that old house. They lived in the walls and in the attic; they scratched away at odd hours of the night. One morning, I awoke before dawn. It was dark still; I put water on to boil, and turned on some sludge metal.
I sat down to journal and have a cup of tea, when I heard what sounded like either a feral cat giving birth or a raccoon eating a live rat in our attic.
***
We married in April.
For our honeymoon, we drove out to the West Texas desert, and stayed in an old trailer. We spent our nights gazing at the stars and into space. We tried to find all of the constellations. I had never been able to see the Archer, as K had never been able to find Cassiopeia. We talked about all the things we were going to do.
We’d move to the desert and do performance art. He’d build me an outdoor shower, and I’d commune with the rocks and the infinite layers of sand and space.
In the warming nights of June, after we returned from our honeymoon, we sat on our stoop and listened to the beginnings of another summer in Texas: Tejano music blared down the street, cats fought, porch-dwellers sipped Modelos as they whispered and softly laughed.
On one of those nights, I spotted a cicada emerging from a cocoon on the side of the porch. It had probably been in the dirt for 17 years, and was finally making another appearance. We watched for hours, its legs slowly coming out in small movements. I saw its eyes open. It was so magical in its ordinariness.
We needed some cash to get to our dream life of becoming performance artists in the desert. So in July, he and I left Dallas for Iowa. While he worked as a migrant farmer, I was going to write a novel. We camped in between a soybean field and a corn field, just outside of Sioux City.
He worked during the day while I read Richard Ford novels and watched our dogs. At night, we sat around the fire with the other de-tasselers. We got tipsy on warm blueberry bark beer. We played banjos, sang ballads, hooted and hollered with the owls into the night. We harmonized as we sang Hobo Lullaby.
Some of us sang the Woody Guthrie version, others the Emmylou Harris one. When we were all finally drunk enough, someone would sing Long Tall Texan, and then everyone would clap.
After the summer of migrant work, we spent the fall in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I found a job at a bookstore, and he picked peaches at a nearby peach farm. It wasn’t the desert, but it was something entirely different, yet entirely beautiful. We were like an old folk song: a husband and a wife, two dogs, and perhaps, one day, even a child.
For a while, we held each other up like fireflies, lighting the way home. We sweated life out, together, as old souls do.
But there was trouble back in Dallas. His brother was charged in the murder of his transgender, cocaine-dealing girlfriend. He had slammed her head into the concrete, and she died in the middle of the night. My husband took to drinking; I kept finding empty bottles in odd places.
One night, just after his brother was indicted, we’d gotten drunk on dollar beer and whiskey shots, and we stopped for pizza on the drive home. We were in a drunken lovers’ quarrel, about what I don’t quite remember. Maybe I was trying to talk him into buying cocaine; I don’t know.
I sat down behind the car while he stopped in to get the pizza. He didn’t see me, he said. He thought I’d walked on home, he said. Anyway, he got in his car and backed over me. He got arrested with a DUI, and I went to the hospital with a broken foot. It was an accident, or so he said.
The thing is, the car didn’t just back over me. It went forward and back and forward and back. It’s unclear, but not really.
My gypsy boy wasn’t really a gypsy. He was a bully. After years of flirting with death, the actuality of it wasn’t so appealing.
Our life deteriorated in Arkansas. I moved to Austin, and he followed. I thought everything was going to be okay, that maybe we’d narrowly averted catastrophe. We’d get our lives back on track.
I worked at a bakery, and continued to fantasize about our future folksy family: “I’ll sew buttons on his shirt and bake our family loaves of bread each Sunday.”
When I finally got pregnant, we danced.
It was all a fantasy, until it became real.
He was supposed to build our home from the outside in, and I, in my nesting phase, would build it from the inside out.
Instead, he shot meth, gambled in underground casino halls with pimps and hookers, stole my bike and my books and sold them for drug money. Instead, he broke into my parent’s home and stole a check from my mom and dad, and then left a trail of blood up their staircase. And I, I went through pregnancy alone.
***
Getting high on meth is like an initiation into the dark order of things. It’s an induction into a different kind of cult. Crystal meth is made of the same lye that Texas State Troopers use to dissolve the carcasses of roadkill, it is the same lye that serial killers use to dispose of their prey.
To make meth, one must mix lye with anhydrous ammonia, the chemical fertilizer that burns skin to the touch. Ionine, ephedrine, phosphorus. Drano, brake fluid, butane. Hydrochloric acid, which is used to remove rust and iron from steel. He was setting himself on fire from the inside out. He slowly dissolved his organs, lungs, kidneys.
He got high on death itself in an attempt to control the electrical circuity of his own heart. He followed his psycho-sexual obsession with death and destruction to its logical conclusion.
All the while, this new living being’s heart beat away inside of me.
***
I was riddled with anxiety and nightmares about him. I was sure that he was going to die. Up at night, while she kicked my ribs and and tugged at my belly button, I prayed for him. Sometimes I even prayed that he would die.
Many nights I lay awake, tormented by the vision that one day he’d shoot up, maybe with a bigger dose than normal; that he’d see his death coming, he’d be alone, and he’d realize it was too late. I grieved his death before it ever happened. I grieved his death while he was still half-alive, existing in between two worlds.
I gave birth to Edith during a hard freeze in late January. It was holy yet real, magical in its ordinariness, and there was nothing surreal about it. It just made sense, as if I’d been waiting my entire life for this one biological happening. My own mother watched me open, and saw her grandchild come out. My dad cut the umbilical cord.
People lifted me up to breathe. I was intensely focused. And when she finally came out, I let out an uncontrollable gasp of joy.
Her tadpole body is forever fossilized inside of me: our hearts, like amphibians — four-chambered — are one.
***
In ninth grade biology, our class dissected a frog. My partner and I got a particularly fat frog. As I sliced it open, I saw the tousled gray hair, and then the nimble nose, of a medium-sized mouse. I yelped and ran straight to the bathroom to vomit.
Those nights I stayed up nursing Edith, I wondered: if I dissected K, what I would find? A raccoon? A cicada? A frog? Another little boy — like those wooden Russian dolls — the little boy who he really is: trapped, somewhere, deep down inside of his belly or his heart?
***
In the natural world, mating is always wild. I’ve heard that the female hyena, to entrance her mate, will adorn herself with a scrotum and testes; she hides her ovaries and uterus deep inside the pit of her belly. Some species of fish can change their sex at will; their gender is completely fluid.
The black widow spider kills her mate once she is impregnated. Some species of octopi have no maternal nature at all; they leave their babies at the bottom of the ocean after childbirth.
Some species reproduce according to the seasons; they conceive in the Fall in order to to give birth in the fat lushness of Spring, so that their babies can eat, grow, and survive.
I spent most of my life groping in the dark for this mysterious happening. Like an animal, I instinctively knew who and how and when and where. K imparted to me his one wild and raucous seed, and for that I am thankful.
It turns out life, not death, was the most logical conclusion to the thing I had been seeking.
Edith is now almost two years old. I watch her now; she smiles and yells and laughs and twirls. She is completely and totally wild. She enchants, and she is enchanted. She explores and adventures; she dances and she climbs. She is magical and bubbly and sparkly and spilling over with life.
She is my wild woman, my spirit animal.
***
Patton Halliday Quinn is librarian and single mom by day, but by night she a spirit warrior and her weapons of choice are chocolate cake and hot baths. She has a Master of Arts in the Humanities and lives in her hometown of Austin, Texas, where it’s just close enough to the desert to feel wild, but far enough from the wilderness for her not feel dangerously isolated. If five words could sum her up, they would be: raw, witty, logical, feral, and absurd. She also likes to do art and might be mildly insane.
***
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