High school was a very trying time for me...as with most I just never fitted in. I wished I was a cheer leader (and yes hated the cheer leaders)...I wanted to date the most popular boy and go to all the dances. I wanted to have a boyfriend to take me to the football games and to hold my hand as I went down the school hallway. I had none of this. I did not find love in the home and found only jokes made fun of me in the school. I was still making my own clothes and still hoping one day that life would turn in my favor.
I wanted a nice coat to wear to school one day and decided to borrow (my sister says I swiped it...lol..which I did in a way..lol) my sister's coat. The coat I had was way too small for me and very much out of date. I tried on my sister's coat, of which she had several, and started to walk to school. I felt like a princess. Lame I am sure for having just a coat to make me feel good about myself but life was like that for me in those years. The coat was blue with a mock fur collar. It was not new but it was pretty. I was halfway to school when my sister drove up on me yelling out the car and cursing at me for her coat back. I was so furious, I so wanted to be able to wear that coat on that day. I threw her coat into the street and continued on to school in the cold...shivering and hurting for I felt so humilated by the experience. I later came home and found that my sister had marked the bedroom that we shared with lines to show where I may or may not trespass..lol. I found that most of the bedroom was marked to be her domain. I hated that room..I hated my life...I hated everything.
I started to find my friends outside of the school system. I found misfits like myself who didn't fit in and were social outcasts. I found that I was skipping school more and more and finding ways to meet with my friends and finding a bit of happiness. School was just one insult after the other about me being a dork, fat and ugly. My friends outside of school accepted me and I started to bloom with their attention. We would go the the local arcade and spend our afternoons hanging out...we sat in the park and told stories about those who made fun of us...in doing that it made us feel equal and sometimes even better then them.
It was also starting to be the time of the hippy era. Drugs were starting to become the norm and easy to obtain. I also found that with the local fort that men were to be had in a somewhat of an easy manner..yet I knew all they wanted was just the sex..but for a short time when they held me I felt wanted. This was the late sixties and the Vietnam war was in full force. People I meet would be sent off shortly and never heard from again. Sometimes we would get bit and pieces of what happened to them...some died...some were lost and some returned a different person. Everything was being lived in the extreames...love, sex, drugs and friendships. I was living life to the extream also...I soared on acid, ran full force on speed and crashed on booze. I went from man to man hoping that this one would be the one who would love me forever and treat me as their princess...but all I found was cheap one night stands and a broken heart.
One night I was in another town with a new "boyfriend" at his home. I liked this man but knew that it wouldn't last..yet I enjoyed the attention. He asked his friend to take me home that night and he did...on the way the friend said he had to stop at his home for something. He was a married man and his wife was out of town. I didn't think anything of it till I was dragged into his bedroom and found that I had a knife inserted into my private place. I was sodomized over and over while the knife was held in it's place. I couldn't move..just could only endure it. I was later taken home where I found that I was bleeding and in a sad condition. I never told anyone in my family. I doubt they would have believed that it was not something that I asked upon myself...for I was blamed for everything those days. I was raped twice in my teen years....and ganged raped once. Yet I never told my family.
I tried to run away from home once in my late teens. Me and a friend thought that anything would be better and we took to the roads. Over 200 miles later and many close calls we were picked up by the police and my friends parents came to pick us up. We were placed in the local county jail to "teach us a lesson" as my mother told me. My father at the time was overseas again with the military and my mother just didn't want to deal with me(can't really blame her for I was a handfull..lol). We were in with the hookers and low-life for that week...yet found them more friendly then my own family at that time. The only thing the week in jail taught me was to not trust my family...to depend on my friends and to feel more and more that life was cruel and unforgiving.
I retreated more and more from my family. They also retreated from me. I found that I had a resentment over the unfair treatment I found in the house...how my siblings were given advantages that I was not(I felt)...how they received things that I did not. Is it any wonder I rebeled against them?
I skipped so much school in my senior year that I was asked to leave at the end of that school year. I was not to graduate with my fellow classmates. I also found that in the early seventies that this took place in ....the peacefull hippy era was coming to a close. Life was changing and moving on...and becoming uglier. My group drifted and fell apart and I wondered into being friend with a group of motorcycle riders. I was becoming a very hard person on the outside and yet the inside was still a little girl just wanting to be loved.
My father came home from overseas and life became hell. They were being tansfered to north carolina and I was asked if I would stay behind or go with them. I was only seventeen at the time but knew they did not want me to say I would follow them on the move. I packed what I had and moved in with a friend. I found that I was so very afraid and alone and had no where to turn. I bonded closer to the motorcycle gang in hopes of having a "family" in some form. I was asked that to remain I was to become a part of the group as a "mama" I did not know at the time what that entailed but I was so desperate to belong that I agreeded. I found out that afternoon that it meant that I was to be ganged raped by every member in the gang...and in the presence of every member. I endured it and silently cried inside while I pretended to want this experience and wanted to be a part of the gang more then anything.
My stupid idea of belonging boiled down to just being a whore for the gang members...yet I endured for I had nowhere to turn. My older sister lived just 20 miles away yet I could not turn to her for help.....and wonder if she would. I had no where to go and nothing I could do. The place I was staying at got busted by the police and when I returned to it that night it was locked up with miles of yellow police tape. All that I owned was locked behind that dooreven my purse with all my ID's so getting a job was out of the question.... yet I would not be able to retrieve it for fear of being charged with possession of the grass that the place was busted for. On that day I became a homeless person.
The so called friends that I knew scattered and I was forced to walk many miles to the state park at night to sleep and back into town to pan-handle for a meal. I lost a lot of weight and became sickly. I meet a person who was planning on goin awol from the military and he offered to take me with him to his hometown to stay at his parents home for awhile. The idea sounded like a good one at the time so I took him up on it. We ate out of garbage dumpsters behind grocery stores and shypioned gas for his run down car...finally we arrieved at his parents home. I was able to spend one night there before his parents kicked me out and turned their son into the military to be returned to face his punishment. I was on my own with no ID....knowing no one and in a strange town. I meet a married lady who offered for me to stay at her home in exchange for my doing the housekeeping and child watching...this went ok for awhile till she thought I was after her husband. I could care less about her ugly husband but it didn't stop her from having me arrested for being a vagrant.
The police in that indiana town called my father and asked if he wanted me back. My father said I could return if I was to go back to school and follow by his rules. I had no choice but to return or face jail. My father wired just enough money for a bus ticket home...no money for food on the trip or anything else. I was going back from the fire into the frying pan.....my soul was so beated down and defeated....I was truely at the bottom.
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