Violence

So, shit was real, including some overt violence between Janessa and me over the six month course of our relationship. I only remember three instances of actual hands-on physical violence. In fact, we had had verbal blow ups which were easily more traumatic, but our aggressive physical confrontations were fraught with meaning. I remain thankful these outbursts were infrequent.

The first time I remember hands being laid aggressively, we had been high for weeks, and I was making exploratory inquiries into strategies we might use to stop for a day or two. At the time, a power confrontation involving control of who smoked cocaine where, and when, and with whom in my house, or some such deeply intellectual and richly non-productive argument was unfolding. At some time, as the conflict ratcheted up, I gathered all the glass stems (crack pipes) in the house to put them in one place, in the drawer of the nightstand in my bedroom. When Janessa went into the office, in another part of the house, she couldn’t find the stems she expected there, and came tearing at me in full-voiced Banshee mode, into my bedroom to find my pipe to smoke my up with. I grabbed the big fistful of pipes and headed for the door, while Janessa brought her hand down on the back of my neck, grabbed the collar of my t-shirt as I lurched ahead, now toward the bathroom door. I saw the sliding door had been left open only about 6 inches, but I lunged at it, tossing the handful of crack pipes as accurately as I could, with Janessa’s paw yanking my collar, holding me back, ripping the seam in my shirt, holding me up but twisting my shoulder around.

My toss was true, and I watched almost as if in slow-motion. All those glass pipes sailed in a graceful underhanded arch, through the narrow opening of the door and disintegrated into glass slivers in a smashing, tinkling cascade against the tile floor, bouncing off the tub, shards skittering across the whole floor. Janessa, dropped her grip on me, slammed the sliding door the rest of the way open, stomped into the bathroom, screeched, howled, and leaped as if she’d cut her foot (but she was in sneakers), picking up pieces of glass and discarding them, and she fretted and cursed her way out of the room, and in another half-hour, out of the house. She didn’t come back for a day and a half.

At the time, I had not been touched by anyone of any gender in a hostile manner, physically and aggressively, in at least forty years. I was breathless and stunned after this outburst with Janessa, feeling an electrically-charged euphoria full of vindictiveness and hate. My nervous system felt bathed in this new belligerence hormone.

Physically, Janessa was overwhelmingly stronger than me, but I was devious and cold-blooded. I have to confess, I knew from experience I could shred this woman’s good will and self-esteem with my words, with a bloody efficiency in inverse proportion to how well I knew her, how much I cared for her, and her for me, because I brandished her own confidences and confessions, the vulnerabilities she’d divulged to me, against her in the cruelest, most hurtful way possible. I could reliably make her cry in less than a minute. Yay.

I almost never act toward anyone in any way but as a gentleman; I believe I am a more-or-less normal person. Whenever I acted this horrible, angry way it was breathtakingly out of character—a shot out of the blue, or an attack of some mental disorder. Few of my relationships (there were many, way too numerous to recount or even inventory) withstood more than one or two of my freak-outs. I have, at various times, to various people, been a complete, unredeemable and right-bad-news motherfucker, in the worst ways. I am perhaps too evolved to ever forgive myself for this frightfully bad behavior, and clearly too unevolved to completely stop the behavior. It feels very reptile-brained, and it’s the only way I know to fight– never raise a hand, but spit eviscerating words, pile up insults, and contempt, try to enlist shame. Use the C word, the N word. When we fought this way, there was never any resolution, just retreat. When a crisis had passed, we’d never waste time analyzing or unpacking our behavior, except perhaps to point and laugh, ruefully and jacked on up, always from some moment in the future when it seemed most absurd to have ever behaved that way, this way we scarred our love with trauma.

The next incident I remember between us, involving physical violence, I was trying to get rid of her, had locked her out of the house hours earlier. I’d driven into town, then came back, stopped to grab the mail from the box at the end of the driveway, came into the house and walked into my bedroom to find Janessa climbing in through the window.

“What in the actual fuck?” I thought. Words were exchanged, voices were raised. I tried to push her back out, but I didn’t really want to injure her or the window (it was a tight squeeze), she was heavy, strong, and mad as a hornet. I held the stack of mail I had just picked up, and as she struggled head-first and waist-deep in the window frame, I hit her again and again with the rolled-up sheaf of store flyers and bank statements. I slashed at her with that ridiculous stack of fluttering paper, and swore like a sailor, while she grunted and wriggled and heaved her monumental ass the rest of the way in. We faced one another and both of us spontaneously broke into excited, breathless laughter and hiccuping sobs at the same time. Our lives at that moment were smashed irreparably at our feet. We had defied every one of the others’ ultimatums, broken all the others’ rules, both said “No” to and violated every boundary, and yet here we stood. I picked up the mail off the floor, shudder-sobbed one last time, and went out into the rest of the house, to see if I could find my life out there, to try and make my life out there work. Janessa was back. Like herpes, cold sores, and chicken-pox, she’d never be completely gone; she didn’t “come back,” she recurred, she flared up. Presented.

The last time we locked horns and it got physical was absurd, even to us at the time it was happening. It felt to me as if I were acting in a bad play, under a terrible director. It will become obvious, but Janessa and I were epically, sometimes I felt maybe heroically high, as much of the time as we could. We were freaks, but wide-eyed, friendly, enthusiastic ones. And generous. We were always high, and when we were around other people, we made sure they were high too. Shit happened fast and constantly; we had energy, resources, a car, and no place to be in the morning. We’d stay up for days at a time, crash, then start right up again, sometimes four hours later, sometime 16 hours later. Sleep would come and find us, have her way with us, then we were off again. Different days, different people, different adventures.

Well, with all this activity and energy and socializing, countless irritating things would go wrong. I wouldn’t get my change back from some transaction, or some promised errand was overlooked, a coke deal would go wrong, an obligation brazenly overlooked. I would try and keep a running catalog of all the hurts, hindrances, and IOU’s so I could tally them up while anyone still remembered, usually toward the end of a run when the list was long and the pain was considerable. I was always, almost by definition, the loser in our deals and schemes, because I paid for everything. I’d begun to invite, and almost bask in, this deep feeling of victimization–my basking approached fetish. I’d clutch my scroll of woes and violations in my head, like Gollum grasped his precious Ring, resentful yet enthralled and helpless in the presence its beauty and power.

I no longer remember a single detail of the particular injustices I’d carried to this specific juncture; all I know is I had furiously clambered up the stairs to Janessa’s bedroom, and pulled out of the corner a six-foot long curtain rod, with heavy decorative ferrules at each end. I grabbed the rod and held it like a baseball bat as I approached her while she stood cowering, turning her body away, more-or-less cornered, over by the back wall. As I swung my arms back, ready to brain my freak of a girlfriend with this metal club, I realized: 1.) I didn’t want to kill her, or seriously injure her and 2.) I had to be careful where I hit her, because I loved her and I’d have to care for her if she were incapacitated, and 3.) I’m way too old, feeble, weak, and strung out to be jousting like this (by now she had grabbed the other rod, and we each warily circled the other). I scored a glancing blow off the top of her arm, then lost my balance and crumpled down on the corner of the mattress. She had swung her weapon, trying to hit me (High! Like in the face! Bitch!), but my collapse meant her swing missed, and the rod flew out of her hands, clanked uselessly across the floor. She sat. We were both defeated, sobbing, helpless not to hurt the other, helpless to protect ourselves. We doled out to each other fifty shades of pain, each shade etched in heroin and crack cocaine. Our situation stayed this way only another couple of weeks, as this specific ending finally came to be. Others would follow.