So I left off at “I started living with you just like that.”
Angelica snaps in my face. She confirms it. In a court of law, she wouldn’t be able to say that. She would have to clarify factually what “a snap” meant, but I remember it being overnight. I don’t remember going home, other than for a birthday party, though there were discrepancies in Angelica’s testimonies that might suggest Dr. J might have been around a little bit in the beginning. Unclear. Situations like these tend to… progress.
I don’t know anything about my basic set up. Where I slept, what I ate, nothing, as NOW I am an adult, and it took my LIFE thus far to get here, and now, I have real questions.
But the immediacy of the situation, as I started living with her right away, smells of money at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club.
“How much were you paid to protect me?” Once the accusation was launched. “1200 a week,” for 24/7 care. Today, that would equate to something like 11,000 a month. We didn’t start there, but it’s to introduce the element of money, that an innocent ask might have come attached with a wad of cash. She took the bait, and one night snowballed. Who knows? Meaning, the actual initial steps of this situation might not be totally clear, but money has its effect, and it did, so that permitted the situation to progress right away. She could have been paid more, as I can’t assume that she told me the whole truth. I’m following her logic though… why would a woman WASTE that much cash if it weren’t true? “She cried real tears,” which I get, which is the next step, but first she uses money to trap an innocent woman, someone who couldn’t have even IMAGINED that anyone COULD do something so vile. But… when it comes to a child molester, this figure that lurks in the wings of every nation, every house, by this point, by how people talk about it, we can indeed imagine it… in theory.
For a while Dr. J called every day, and during this phone call, Dr. J’s chaotic personality comes to the forefront where she’s speaking about her lovers, you’re not my best friend, and here, when I would tell people the story, they would often wonder: do you think she knew what she was doing? Or they would look at me as if… I were exaggerating, or not telling the truth. I placated these types too much.
“Call a cop.”
“They’ll explain,” putting them down, as people put me down.
Even through these lines, though it’s gotten better, I still deal with these people, you see. People who believed they KNEW what the story was, who interrupted me before I could finish, or make sense. Another important point: I didn’t make sense around this story for years…
I was in a sex scandal, please, we’re about to enter some weird game, now.
I think these types of people have their system of operating, just like anyone else, so do you know what you’re doing? She’s keeping her close. She’s keeping her on a close leash, while expressedly not asking for me, not once. Angelica confirmed it at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club since telling anybody this story was a fucking match. I could hardly get through the story… without these balls flying at me. “Maybe you don’t remember…” with wide lost eyes, which reminded me of my mother.
“Not once,” Angelica confirmed. “Not once.” She, too, was confused.
There’s a haze Angelica expresses. I’ll provide another testimony, my aunt’s which confirms that Dr. J’s phone calls could knock people off, and they can’t respond, as I might have anticipated the disbelief, even, and I was the daughter of a lawyer, regardless, so I was anchoring myself as best as I could to people’s accounts. “Secure the witnesses,” so to speak, as my aunt is no longer alive. It was an innate reaction.
I had to INSIST, YES, YES, still, to people over the years — I REMEMBER THIS SITUATION. I spoke to Angelica about it for years. They still shut me down. Not always. But it never made SENSE. Because NO ONE heard the child molester, at all. The lie… was an ethereal concept. To me, too.
Again, I thought it was a lie for most of my life. Now, I don’t know, but I am here, that I know…telling you what happened… shaking, a little.
The phone call smells like a game to bring in Eric Berne, a transactional psychologist who wrote The Games People Play, though he might have deferred my case to another psychologist. He believed the GAMES people play, which has to do with the DRAMAS we kick up when we start getting close to either avoid or get intimacy, run deep into our childhoods. We learn what games to play there, which I’m picking up on, at nine. It’s just, in this case, there’s no intimacy, if that makes sense. She’s a Joker who pulled something crazy on the highway.
What was this game?
She launches the accusation. Angelica now anticipates that he might want to ACT nice, like he doesn’t know what’s going on here. I follow that. I imagine her decision came out of their conversation, like “protect her, he might try,” with the tear falling to Un Bel Di, Madame Butterfly, “to take her,” something. It was the NICE game of it that strikes me now, though at the time, this throughline was semi-subsurface, as if awareness were a layered exercise.
So I put a notecard that at least introduces that as part of the game, almost one I can’t help, that she’s going to erase his throughline, but you’ll see how we’re talking AROUND it, and I’m not going to be able to connect these dots until later. “Can you imagine someone lying about that?” I’ll just bring that in. “Wait what?” “But isn’t it already a lie, Dr. J?”
I’ll go into his utterly bizarre phone call, his request to visit, and the “happy go lucky” dances we put on for him, as he stood in a wide open door.
“Why didn’t you call the cops?”
“Because I didn’t want to send you to foster care.”
So the spectacle is going to ring true… as a child is most likely, or is at a higher likelihood of being abused in foster care… and people thought this situation was so unbelievable. I saw nothing but truth in it.
My mother reflected the truth, which was my underlining hypothesis, in her universe of mirrors. Maybe here I’ll go into her accosting the priest every Sunday with her rapes in Catholic Church.
And here she is: she ran into this woman’s house and put on an aria of ignoring me and fawning all over her child.
“You were jealous,” Angelica slips it in, so the whole thing is going to fall on ME? Really D. J? Is that the joke? (I think it is.) My other question was “how do we become who we are…” like I’m going to be taught to become a degenerate, basically. “Did this happen to her?”
Angelica wasn’t too sure, if I was going to become her, even — amazing! She was amazing. Isn’t it amazing what we can do? With the time given to us? And she doesn’t know how my mother handled me. What? Couldn’t really process that at nine. Meaning she didn’t know how my mother handled me sexually? Something about taking her breast out?
My father to and fro the club, he says, she was shipped away to different family members for the first ten years of her life, because her sister beat her, and I couldn’t help but notice that I had been sent away… as it it reflected the truth.
The money ran out. I start getting dropped off as Dr. J tried to slip away. Angelica started dropping me off to this lunatic protector of hers, which, at this point, I might have been strapped into some roller coaster ride, but the reader should see that I have every reason and right to question if it was true.
Sure, he would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s a couple of years coming out of these years, but still. Was he that sick?
There’s no play here, on behalf of my father, that would suggest it wasn’t true. But she’s going to decide it’s not true because “she was the biggest liar on earth,” except, who gives a shit? My father didn’t even have to change his fucking operation.
She asked me, “it wasn’t true was it?” She wasn’t sure.
She sends me home with him. Her mirrors are being smashed off the walls…strange time to bring your child home no, one who was, presumably, as I interrogated him too, “being brainwashed against you?” In his words.
The fact that she was tax law expert brings up what that system is even about which is “a shared responsibility” that society works basically speaking. Unreal, it was so spelled out. But it’s MY fault. The innocent one.
In the end, after this fight my father and I had, where we’re negotiating around the Cutlass, like he’s going to come after me — for real?
He goes, “she did this because she was jealous…”
Wait, so she lied about you being a molester in some way, because she was jealous? Of a four year old… and you’re not… acting as if this is weird?
In the end, was it true?
I would leave it there for now because it’s a short.
I don’t know if I can say anything but that, in this short, because it will be too long, coming out of a spell, needing to battle my world. Was it true? NOOOOOOOO. So rage, maybe, that turned out to be the force I needed to plow through all the “bullshit” I got from my so-called community over a story like that. Where, once again, I’m getting HURT left and right because I’m trying to say something serious. And no one treated it as serious! Nothing but Dr. J, left and right.
I do not know if it was a fucking lie. I mean what I say. And my friends, everyone in my life, just shut me down. One after another.
And like, “oh, you didn’t KNOW?” How about this asshole? TRY ASKING A QUESTION.
I could have died by how my friends responded, and they don’t even realize how terrible they look.
Watch out, for real. Do not come up to me. I won’t be playing NICE. I will be cursing in a context, you jerks.
Matt Damon AS psychologist gives me a high five. “Progress.”
Man, I was so angry.
“Imagine? She said, “imagine.” I already came out of that story. I used to say she gave me away to a total stranger — which might not be true, if you’re paying attention, as Angelica’s husband got his taxes filed by my mother — because she lied that my father was a child molester. It was already built INTO THE CONCEPT. I got here, you see, I got here — having needed to tell my whole world, practically, to fuck off with a FIST. Serena fucking Williams. She is behind me, a nine year old in a goddamn sweatband.
Gets brutal out there. But we’re supposed to shake hands in the end, aren’t we? Oh, slipping my hand over my hair, “psyche.” You can fuck off. Right? That’s what the audience wants to see. I’ll take my goddamn trophy.
I’m joking, but this has been such an ordeal.
But I got to the end. I simplified the route. And that’s it. I get to take it step by step now. I just want to get this done.
So now, I gotta go through these notecards and go step by step with each scene.
(The ghost of Barbara Harris and I are making a quick exit, action stars.)
But it’s a good story, I hope, I hoped it would make the right impact. That’s what I hope now. I came this far.
