An Ass-Kicking Before Prom.

I was brutally beaten by my adult boyfriend when I was a vulnerable kid.

Me, a few months before the beating.

When death visits your home, everyone else leaves. Friends send flowers and casseroles but not their bodies, their presence, their words. NO ONE WANTS YOU, I scrawled in Sharpie across the wall of my bedroom closet, in the days of my daddy’s dying. It was not an untruth.

It was at this point in my life that I met Joey. He was six years older than me, twenty-two to my sixteen.

I was eating Ecstasy in a trailer park when we first locked eyes. He caught me dancing on a table, and like many of the boys there, liked what he saw.

He, however, was not a boy.

He—was a man.

A few days after Daddy’s funeral, Joey took me out to lunch and put gas in my car.

“My dad is dead, too, you know,” he told me.

That was all I ever wanted from him.

Not the sandwich. Not the gas.

Not the big bad thing that was coming to serve as the great ghastly distorter of my upcoming womanhood.

No. I wanted the dead dad.

Together, we were two half-orphans. I loved that about us. I was a kid living at home with my newly-widowed mother, to whom I was as unnoticeable as a moth in our shared darkness. The few friends I did have, kids my age, stopped inviting me to Bubba’s for milkshakes or Twin Arches for weed circles. A dead parent is a horrifying, unmentionable thing. Do you imagine he is rotting yet? Do worms eat his eyes? Do you think I will ever again feel his rough palm, the hand of a working man? Only in dreams, right? Only in dreams, because just like Daddy, God is dead, too. Let’s change the subject.

“What was your father’s name?” Joey asked, half an Italian sub in one hand and my deepest yearnings in the other.

“David,” I answered. “David Burton.”

“David Burton.”

“But his friends called him Kool.”

“My father’s name was Giuseppe. Like me.”

“Tell me about him.”

“You first,” he said.

And thus, the affair began.

Daddy’s body wasn’t even cold.

Six months later, Joey would brutalize me with enough black-eyed fury to bruise my brain, but before that, he filled up my every hole with a darkness I devoured like a girl guzzling venom, thirsting to death for death.

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They say violence breeds violence, so maybe that’s why in my twenties, I slapped good men like that shit was normal. Maybe that’s why I would eventually let other men pay to hit me. My mama, she was hit, too. Granny as well. Come to think of it, Great Granny as well. Come to think of it, all us women in the family. Getting your ass kicked was a rite of passage into womanhood, just as sure as starting your period.

The night Joey beat me began as a good time. A local drug dealer in Danville had around a hundred people crammed into his wrong-side-of-the-tracks shack that night, and where I come from, that’s one hell of a party. When I walked my nubile teenage body into that Evil Land shithole filled with twenty-something men guzzling forties, it’s fair to say, heads turned. I was young, and wounded, the easiest shot in the forest.

Joey bought us some acid, which we promptly ate. He then began pounding beers. The man was a marvel with the drinking—unparalleled. Within the first hour, he drank twenty-four beers. Twenty-four beers in a hour.

And that is how Joey accomplished the unheard-of feat of out-drinking an acid trip.

Fellow revelers gathered to witness this anomaly—a man so drunk that he put LSD to sleep. Everyone was laughing at this wild man passed out cold on the couch, but—

I knew there was going to be a problem.

Alcohol always made Joey enraged.

Over the course of our relationship, when drunk, Joey had committed the following:

1. Choked me in a rainy parking lot

2. Broken a cop’s hand during a scuffle

3. Attempted to rip the transmission out of my car

4. Lit on fire every photo of himself and his father

5. Lit on fire every photo of himself as a child

Vomit spilled from his sleeping mouth like a mudslide upon the upholstery. A guy at the party stuck French fries up his nose. Someone drew a dick on the back of his neck. I turned him over on his side and laid his spewing head in my lap so he wouldn’t die.

But when he woke up, all he wanted to do was kill me.

He said I’d sucked every dick at the party while he was asleep.

“Asleep,” he called it.

Eyes empty, he leapt to his feet and pointed at me.

“You. Fucking. Whore.”

I ran downstairs and out of the door.

He followed me into the street, taking a pit stop to piss in the front yard. He didn’t even turn his back, dick dangling for all to see.

“I’ll get him out of here,” I promised the other guests, as I searched the street for my car, struggling to locate reality within this acid trip.

With explosive ferocity, Joey rammed me from behind, pushing me off the sidewalk. I fell to my knees in the street.

A friend of mine from childhood—an older boy named Scott—ran over to me, took my chin in his hand, pulled my face close to his. “Do not go home with him,” he commanded.

I put Joey in my car anyway.

And that’s when, with a gurgling snort, Joey spit in my face. Thick spit, ribboned with snot and jeweled with bubbles, tangled in my eyelashes, dripped from my nose.

“He spit in my face! He spit in my fucking face!” I hollered, falling out of the car.

At this, Scott came running.

He yanked Joey from the vehicle by his armpit, stood him square on his feet, and reared back. I covered my eyes.

I’d never heard the sound of bone on bone before. Like a gunshot, or lightning: a sharp, standing-alone sound, a crack that splits the night in two. When I uncovered my eyes, there was my old friend, illuminated in the darkness by a flickering street lamp, cradling his shattered fist. Beneath his feet, Joey lay face-down on the asphalt, blood pooling around his head.

“You killed him,” I whispered.

But he hadn’t.

Joey stood up and smiled as if he wasn’t just felled like a tree. Blood poured from his mouth, gore streaming down his chin, soaking the street with his blood. Half of one of his front teeth was broken on a diagonal. A sharp tooth now. A shark’s tooth now.

When Scott went inside to ice his hand, I used the chance to escape with Joey.

Since Daddy had died and Joey had stepped in, my life had become his absolutely. No person, no crime, no snot spat in my face, could stop me from clinging to this anchor taking me to the bottom of the ocean.

When we got out of the car at his mother’s house, he kicked me square in the ass, sending me to the ground, knocking the breath out of me. With a great leap he stomped on my thigh. I carried his shoe print on my leg all the way until prom.

I ran into his house and into the back bedroom, locked the door behind me, curled up on the bed, and started praying.

Dear Jesus, prom is only two weeks away—

Possessing the unsurpassable strength of the psychotically enraged, Joey tore through the door, the lock popping as easy as a gum ball out of a machine. With slow, deliberate steps, he bared his broken teeth at me and growled.

I looked into his eyes, sending my love through my own. See me. Remember me, your darling half-orphan, your broken girl—

But he—wasn’t there. His eyes were black orbs.

In an instant he was on me, cracking my ribs as I covered my face.

In another instant, he had me by the hair, slamming my head into the wall.

Searing light. Spots swimming behind my eyelids. The sound of the ocean, peaceful, sweet. How easy it is to die.

The commotion woke his mama and she rushed in to investigate. He raised his arm stiff like an oar and swung his cupped hand against her ear. A thin line of blood crept down her neck. I’d expected horror in her face. Instead, I saw only disappointment. And I knew in that moment—this isn’t the first time this has happened.

Joey’s twelve-year-old brother was having a sleep-over that night. He called the police from his bedroom. This wasn’t a first for him, either, the sound of fists on women.

After the police restrained Joey and put him in the car, one of the sleepover boys sat beside me at the kitchen table and slipped a cigarette into my hand. “I stole this from my dad,” the boy whispered as he sidled up beside me, placing in my hand his one single indulgence, his squirreled away treasure, a solitary Marlboro Red. “I’ve been saving it for the best time.”

For his crimes against me, Joey would be sentenced to six weeks in jail.

Turns out, you can beat up your mother and teenage girlfriend and not get into much trouble.

Like Joey would tell me, a lifetime later, at a random encounter in a bar:

“That stuff’s in the past.”

Joey’s dad didn’t just die. He killed himself. Joey’s mother found him slumped in the car in their garage. Joey was just a boy then.

“That stuff’s in the past.”

A dark spot in my soul wants men to hit me. Hurt me. A darker spot in my soul wants me to hurt myself. Destroy my own life. Introduce chaos where once there was peace. Yet still, I flinch at innocent movements. Yet still, I have nightmares.

“That stuff’s in the past.”

I snuck around and fucked Joey after he beat me up, while he was in hiding from my brothers who were trading pot to losers for clues.

I have hit men, good men, men who didn’t deserve it.

Two half-orphans, alone together. Two half-orphans, breaking the numbness with violence to the point that breaking is feeling, and so it is welcome. Two-half orphans, the stronger one paying the weaker one the father’s tab of abandonment and alienation. I don’t know any more who was who.

That stuff’s in the past.

Never.

I took this photo of my odometer as I drove home, six in the morning, after the night-long beating. The photo was meant to mark the end of this relationship, the end of me being hurt. 141,956 miles. By 141,957, I would never be beaten again. I cannot believe I was a high schooler creating these kinds of markers.

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This is an excerpt from my memoir, Too Pretty To Be Good. You can find it in paperback form on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, which also has it in e-book format. You can get the Kindle version here.

PS. I recently did an interview in which the interviewer kept insisting that I should identify as a “victim” and not “a survivor.” He called me “hard” and said my interview was “disappointing.” He said that when I call myself a “survivor,” I empower abusers to think that their abuse has no real effect. It is not my job to educate abusers by spending my life in tears. Nonetheless, I am self-conscious about sharing the true stories of my early life because they tell tales of unbelievable-degrees of victimization. Sometimes people comment on my essays and say, “Get over it.” I think I am over it, in that I have managed to create a healthy marriage, family, and career. Yet the fact remains that our childhoods are indeed formative. This experience was a cornerstone in the building of the woman I would become.

In case you are curious, the boyfriend discussed in this essay continues to go to jail for beating women.

I really lived this. This was my real life. Thank you for reading.