A Classy Tale~

It is now story time with the Renegade….

Often, I am asked what is the source of my rage…because yeah, it can be rather shocking. Most often, people assume it is either job related, or, like my job, predicated on the fact that I was abused or molested as a child. Truth is, it is neither of those things. There are many reasons I have some rage, and today, I will share one with the class.

In fact, class is a key word there.

Now, the subtitle of this entry could be “So maybe the Patriarchal Society did fuck me, so now I am fucking them back and making them pay me handsomely for it”, but that is really long. So I will stick with this:

“Renegade’s first real entry on class, personal as political”

The first house I remember living in as a child was a four-room ranch style that my parents rented. It was small, with ugly pink and white aluminum awnings over the windows, a tiny back yard that was mostly dirt and weeds, cracked pavement in the front, and ugly chain link fence all around. The linoleum in the kitchen was pale orange, which made no sense to me, because nothing else in the kitchen was orange. Olive green carpet. There was a kitchen, a living room, my parents’ bedroom, and a bedroom me and my brother shared, though he generally preferred to sleep on the couch in the living room. One bathroom. Both my parents are neat freaks, so everything was clean, but we still managed to have bugs. Lots of them. Spiders, ants, silverfish….bugs. It was exactly one block away from the interstate. The lot across from us had a similarly ugly chain link fence, a trailer, a drunk guy who had lots of guns and dogs. Mean, big dogs. One of whom jumped the fence and attacked my brother at one point and he still has the scars on his legs to this day. I recall hitting that dog with a baseball bat until it let go of him. The owner of the dogs (and guns), managed to scare the dog off before it got to me by firing a round into the air. The house next to us had a younger couple living in it, and it seemed they were either madly in love with each other or he was high and beating the shit out of her on a nightly basis. My bedroom window faced their bedroom window, and in the summer (no air conditioning) I recall hearing both. My parents called the cops on him several times, once after she scared the shit out of me and my brother by knocking on our door bleeding and beat to shit screaming “he’s going to kill me” while they (my parents) we not home. She kept taking him back though, and never pressed charges. Both my parents, owners of high school diplomas, worked. My mom has been in the same field (insurance) for as long as I’ve been alive…still is, in fact. My dad has had more jobs (when he had them) than I can count over the years. We ate a lot of pasta, because it was cheap. And creamed tuna fish on toast. And soup. And boxed macaroni and cheese, sometimes with water though, because we had no milk or opted to save it for breakfast. The power got turned off occasionally. The phone rang a lot and we were told not to answer it. At the time, I was not really aware that everyone did not live like this. My relatives that we visited had nicer places, but nothing that overtly screamed “money”…I just figured they were luckier. We had a white station wagon with the brown wood looking paneling on the side, it was named Martha. There were very few other kids in the neighborhood, but enough that we could manage a game of baseball or kickball up the street in an empty lot, which usually had to be cleared of broken booze bottles first. Nothing seemed that strange to me until I started going to school. My parents wanted us to have good educations, so we went to a private school. Which had it’s own version of welfare, as it were. My dad worked there cleaning and doing minor repairs and painting on weekends, and we got lunch vouchers, and hand me down uniforms from other students. School supplies were donated. We rode the bus for free. We were the only ones who did. This was noted by fellow students and the occasional teacher and pointed out. Often. Even though we were in uniforms, I was made well aware of the fact that mine were donated from someone else who could afford their own, and people were quick to point out I was wearing k-mart socks and tennis shoes rather than Nikes. On a daily basis. I had some friends, but after seeing their houses, which seemed massive and stately in my mind, with the power always on and every junk food imaginable in the fridge, I was embarrassed to invite them to mine. One day on the bus ride home, as we got close to our stop, an older boy asked me where we lived. I pointed down the street to our house. He said, “You live by the highway?” I said yes. He laughed and said “only bums live by the highway. That makes you white trash!” It became a chant as my brother and I exited the bus. And stayed one for a good few months. Someone then pointed out that my father was not actually white. The taunt occasionally became more colorful. When my brother pointed out that my family was actually mostly Slavic, “commie” got added to the list (cold war and all). He played it all off with humor, which has always been his way. I started punching people or beating them down with my donated back pack full of donated books and donated school supplies until they stopped. It was worth the detention and trips to the shrink just to have them stop. I remember wanting to sic the neighbors dogs on them, or hit them with bats…because that is what they reminded me of…the neighbors dogs. One night both the cops and the EMTS ended up at our neighbor’s house. They wheeled her out on a stretcher, and it looked like you see on television. Neither of them came back. We lived there until I was nine.

The second house we rented was, in truth, amazing. I felt like I had died and gone to the Promised Land! Big tri-level, painted and nice carpet and cozy kitchen! I had my own room! In a real neighborhood! We had a big back yard with a lawn that backed right up to a park with a playground and a huge open grass area. Vaulted ceilings and a fireplace! No more worrying about slicing yourself open on a broken Thunderbird bottle while playing football! I was no longer afraid to bring friends home! No bugs, no freaky neighbors, no vicious dogs…and no more donated uniforms! How we managed to afford that, I do not know to this day. I suspect my dad hit it big in Vegas and my mom got a promotion or something. It was great and amazing and it managed to last for two whole years….then, we were out.

The third house we rented was big…but…it was old, and a total mess and back in a similar neighborhood to my first one. Ripped up floors, a back yard that looked like the Amazon Jungle, leaky pipes and rotted dry wall and molded carpets. Writing all over the walls…and bugs. But, I had my own room! I still felt like I had died and gone back to hell though. It was like the first house all over again, only bigger, and I was now fully aware that no, no one else I knew lived like this. We worked, all of us, long and hard, on cleaning the place up, fixing it up, tearing all the shit out of the yard, repainting, making it livable. The girls who were once again laughing at my cheap tennis shoes and donated uniforms were having slumber parties and going to the mall while I was learning how to drywall and use a chainsaw. School sucked. The only thing that kept the class-hounds at bay was one, I would still beat them up if they made fun of me, and two…oddly enough, I was a good athlete. I am convinced to this day my athletic skill in everything from red-rover and dodge ball to tennis and running saved me from honestly, really, beating the ever living shit out of one or two of my classmates. They jeered, and they taunted, and they called me white trash and everything else under the sun behind my back, but if they wanted to win in gym class, they needed me…and even the school, where I was making shit grades and living in detention and could not afford the uniform and sign up fees, looked the other way to have me on the team…volleyball, basketball, track, swimming, gymnastics. Yep, I did all that. And though I never would have made the connection then, or used the word, in my head I already knew what was going on. To them, all of them, the school, the kids, whatever…I was a whore. They didn’t like or care about me, I never got invited to parties or sleepovers, but I had a skill they did want, need, and used…my athletic talent. My brother was smart and funny; he played the same sort of role in a different way…good grades, spelling bees, class clown to boot. Me, I had sports. And at that point, it was enough. Fine, I’d be their jock. I’d be their violent-tempered, athletic whore in my cheap tennis shoes and donated school colored sports gear. I’d win. I’d keep winning. When I did, it lessened the teasing…at least to my face. It, at my occasional right hook, made them stay away, shut up, leave me alone, and it was worth it. And sports, winning? Well, that was one thing I did well. Better than them. So at night, after eating pasta or macaroni made with water, sometimes with the power on, sometimes with it off, I’d go to my room, where the marker scrawled on the walls and the water stains when we moved in kept bleeding through whatever paint we’d put over it, I would lay out my donated uniform and set out my cheap tennis shoes for the next day and I would crawl into bed and think about every name, every insult, every attitude thrown at me, my brother, my family, and I would wrap myself up in a nice little ball of anger and hate and resentment and I would think “just wait, you fuckers, just wait. I will show you. I will show all of you.” And I would sleep. Then in whatever gym activity, whatever extra circular sport was slated for the next day, I would unleash that fury. In gym if it was one of those violent games not played anymore, such as dodge ball, I would hurl that fucking ball as hard as I could. I wanted to hurt them like they were hurting me. If it was after school sports I would play as hard as I could, the most points, the fastest time, whatever it took. I didn’t have friends, no one cared I was flunking two classes, no one cared that people still called me whatever mean names they could think of…I won. They respected and liked that. So you see, I’ve been regarded as a low class whore for quite some time…. I stopped seeing the shrink; after all, he wasn’t helping me much. Rage was a good motivator. When people started calling me stupid because of my bad grades, it motivated me there too. I started making A’s in more than Gym and Social Studies. (never did master math, though, it still vexes me). When the taunts started that I would be a white trash junkie dead or in prison by the age of 17…that motivated me too. I stopped starting fights and saved all up all my anger for sports. And it worked, a little. Or so it seemed at the time. Truth was I was a good athlete with zero social skills or social connections or friends who was already suffering from insomnia and stress migraines who hated and distrusted every single member of the human species and showed, pretty much, not an ounce of human emotion to anyone, ever, unless it was something particularly savage in gym class. My mantra became “I’ll show you.”

Then something strange happened. My parents initially said it was because my mom got a new job that she needed to start immediately, I came to know later in life the truth was my father, a compulsive gambler (explained much), had lost pretty much all the money we did (not) have and owed some rather unsympathetic people some pretty serious bank, but we packed up and moved, literally, in the dead of night, to a new state… I was 14.

We lived out of the car (Martha, yep, still with us) for about a week, then rented a tiny, tiny, house which was no worse than any other I had been in. Our parents enrolled us in public school. Both my parents got jobs…my Mom’s actually paid well! A fresh start, as it were, and being in a public school…literally saved my life, I think. Yeah, there were rich kid assholes there, but there were also kids like me…even in my own neighborhood, and I managed to make a friend or two, even though I never trusted them and was always wary…after all, people always if not let you down, stabbed you in the back or used you…and even in this new big pond, I was still pretty good at sports. My brother managed to blend right in as the smart, funny kid. Class was still there, and important, but hey, for the first time in my life I met other kids who knew what it was like to eat mac & cheese with no milk! I ended up with a small circle of friends; Laura, half Irish and half Sicilian who had a rep for actually praying before she would kick the shit out of somebody, Maria from Argentina, whose name and country of origin alliteration we would often make up songs about, Kay, a Chinese American who was an amazing artist and really, really tall, and Vanessa, who was actually a rather rich white gal but very quiet and preferred doing her own thing to trying to fit in. My parents worked hard, as did I with sports and grades, and for the first time ever, while I was still aware and reminded by some folks of my class status, I had, well, actual friends who were in the same boat or did not really seem to care. It was, in a word, relieving.

I was just over the age of 16 when my parents bought their first house ever. It was good sized, and needed a lot of work, but they got a good price on it because, well, the people living there prior? Not only pigs, but a double murder-suicide. Guy shot his wife and sister in law in the hallway before blowing his brains out in what would become my bedroom. Yes, I know that is fucking creepy. Point is, there were three livable rooms in the house when we moved in, the master bedroom, which would be my parents, and one in the basement with its own access through the garage, which my brother got because he was older, with a job, working odd hours, so that left “the murder room”. Having very little money throughout life and actually finally living in a place that is yours makes you infinitely practical. We won’t discuss what ripping the carpet out of there was like. I managed to, even while now being teased for not only being not rich, but a goth skate rat and looking like a skinny guy, managed to get a boyfriend, a fellow track team member. Maria and I had a falling out when she decided to jump ship to be a popular girl, which entailed a whole lotta sex with popular boys…which did not work…and stabbing me in the back, which I had been prepared for and expected all along anyway (humans, can’t trust ‘em) and I met Melissa, a lesbian budding radical feminist. Thus Ren’s into to feminism, which can be read about here. Life, over all, was better…but, for the most part, I still did not like people, and it motivated me…

Right into a partial scholarship ride to college. Which I could not really afford anyway, but dammit, I WAS going. After all the being called stupid and told I would be junkie and dead or in prison, and oh yeah, white trash; there was NO way I wasn’t going. I still had to show them, after all. All of them. Forever and ever, ad infinitum, amen. Loans, jobs, debt? Bring it on.

So off I went, to the most expensive school I got accepted to.

Which of course found me needing a job. I’d worked prior to that…waitress, office assistant, but no way, while chasing that all important degree, I had time for that, no way it would make me the bank I needed, even living in the dorm and eating school food, to live, pay tuition, buy books, survive. So me, being the infinitely practical type, marched my jock body down to ye olde local strip club. And the rest, as they say, is history…

Which is what I got my degree in, one of them anyway. The other, theatre…all that time with power tools spent fixing up houses lent itself well to set construction. Plus, I like theatre. And I could probably, due to those pieces of paper that I had to have, find and get a “respectable job”…I’ve even had a few of those in my day…but, you know?

Sex work pays better. And, strange and seedy as it can be and all, I know where I’ve come from, and I am not, if at all possible, ever going back there again. I’ve lived with no power, out of a car, in houses that were falling apart. I’ve worn donated clothes and been called white trash, and survived on very little food and beaten up attack dogs with a bat. I’ve kicked refuse out of the way so I had a place to play, ripped bloody carpet out of what would be my bedroom, and I have most certainly been a whore, not the kind who fucks, but a kind who used their body for the pleasure, pride, amusement and glory of others for not nearly as much pay…for a very long time. Hell, professional athletes, models and other entertainers are the most highly paid whores in the world. And I know and remember how all of that feels…and it still makes me angry. And I am not, by whatever means, ever going back there. So yeah, I remain motivated. Rage is good motivation.