Drunk and Seeking Death

My Marriage to Satan, Part 1

The boat to hell is lined with reassurances; photo by Wikimedia Commons

Content Warning: This essay has nightmare fuel. It contains visceral descriptions of child abuse, and references to child sexual abuse. It also includes visceral descriptions of alcoholism, severe depression, and suicidal ideation. It is my past and my life, and also in the strongest terms possible, DO NOT READ this if the above will cause you harm, or even if you don't want to.

The first thing to understand about my first marriage is that I wanted to die when I met Piper. This is the story of how that came to be.

Picture: I'm 16 years old, in a psychiatrist’s office decorated more like that of a crystal energy guru. My hair is long and dyed black, and I have a terrible, scraggly chin beard. My jeans are baggy, and I'm wearing a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. My father is sitting across from me, and his psychiatrist is at her desk, in dreadlocks and an oversized multicolored gown.

I am in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in about three hours my world is going to shatter.

My father is divorcing my mother. It will take another ten years, a bankruptcy filing, and him being disbarred as an attorney for commingling client funds before it concludes.

My mother is living in a rural house on the edge of East Feliciana Parish, on five soggy acres at the front end of a palmetto swamp. Until very recently I'd lived there too, to nightly rosaries, Bible readings, tent revivals, and abortion protests. One day my father stopped coming home. Then he showed up, took me to New Orleans saying it was a work trip, and instead sat me down in a conference room in the office tower at Poydras Plaza, surrounded by his law partners. He told me that he was filing for divorce and wanted me to live with him. I said yes.

Things have not worked out as my father foresaw. I've been going through fits of helpless rage, once smashing in the horn on my car in my high school parking lot. I've stormed out of the apartment more than once and just driven around hours into the night. I won't talk to him, not even when he gives me alcohol. I struggle getting to sleep at night, and sometimes don't sleep at all. The psychologist he made me start seeing has refused to testify on his behalf in court, or to disclose what I've been telling him. He has guessed that I'm angry that he keeps fucking his onetime divorce client when I'm there, loudly and drunkenly. He has denied doing it, loudly and drunkenly, until I agreed with him to make him stop shouting at me. But I still wouldn't talk to him.

So my father has taken me to his own psychiatrist, for a father-son session.

I blink as the psychiatrist tells me that it is a safe space, that I can and should be completely honest. She promises nothing bad will happen, no matter what I have to say. She just wants to know more about what's going on in my life. She says that I can trust her.

My father's eyes are heavy on me as I take a deep breath, and prepare to say one of several deflections I've said countless times in front of him. But suddenly I bury my face in my hands, and start choking out words I can't stop.

“I…hate you,” I hiss at my father. “I don't know what to do, what to say. You don't tell me anything, discipline me, show me how to do the right thing. You're not even a father to me.”

He stares at me, astonished, as the psychiatrist asks me where these dark feelings came from. I grasp at the feelings, but they're sliding through my fingers, dissolving. I feel nauseous and terrified; I'm trembling. She's telling me I have to say things, but the words around the thing keep falling apart in my head.

So I blurt out what happened before it:

Two years prior, my father took me on a summer trip to Greece, where he delivered an annual lecture series on maritime law for Tulane. The night before we were scheduled to leave for Turkey to go sightseeing, one of his law partners suggested that he and I go out to dinner to spend our remaining drachma. So we did. Afterwards, my father exploded at me. He told me I had humiliated and embarrassed him in front of his colleagues during the trip, that I was ungrateful and spoiled, that I had spent too much money. I was absolutely terrified.

The psychiatrist nodded with a patient smile as I started rambling and eventually stopped talking because I lost track of what I was saying. She thanked me for telling the truth, and said the healing could begin. She explained that I couldn't hate my father, because he was part of me, and hating my father was like hating myself. She said family say things between each other they don't mean, and it's important not to fixate on it or ruminate in bitterness and anger. She made us both say we understood and forgave each other.

I felt lighter than I'd ever been as my father silently took me to an Asian fusion restaurant for dinner afterwards. I had told the truth, and it had been okay. I even felt happy. I thanked him for taking me to see his smiling, patient, New Age psychiatrist. The nauseating, overwhelming storm I had felt was subsiding.

I had told the truth, but not the whole truth. What I didn't, and couldn't say at the time, was that after he had scared the shit out of me, my father had made me share a bed with him in our hotel room while he was stark naked. The one coherent memory I have of what happened next is thinking, over and over and over:

“I don't want to be awake right now.”

But I had come right up to the verge of saying the whole truth to a mandatory reporter. And I was about to pay for it.

About an hour after we got back to the apartment, I was playing some video game when my father kicked in the door to my room. He bellowed at me to sit down, and roared that he had contacted everyone who had gone on that trip and they had confirmed to him that nothing I had told his psychiatrist actually happened. I stared at him bug eyed while he thundered that these anonymous witnesses agreed I was rude and sullen and ungrateful, and that he had never so much as raised his voice at me.

“You LIED!” he screamed in my face.

“Dad…” I stammered.

“Don't call me that!” he roared. “You don't have a father! That's what you said, and you lied!”

I followed him out into the kitchen, pleading with him to calm down, that I didn't understand what was happening. He shouted over me to shut up, then “God DAMN it!” over and over.

Then he picked up a chair and smashed it on the floor a few feet away from me. Splintered wood hit my face, drawing blood. I backed away, terrified, while he stormed out and didn't come back.

I called my mother in a blind panic. When she arrived I was crumpled on the ground outside the apartment, sobbing hysterically and incoherently. I had stuffed all of my possessions in a box and left it in the middle of my room, with a scrawled note: 

“Take it all back.”

The next day it got even worse. In my blind panic, I had forgotten that my possessions included a suicide note I had scribbled out a few weeks prior. After a phone conversation between my parents that I didn't hear, my mother drove me silently to the Meadow Wood mental hospital. He was waiting for me there, and in the waiting room he revealed that he had gone through all of my possessions and computer overnight and found my porn stash. He added that I was a sick and disgusting liar. He kept going until attendants took me out of the waiting room to get me away from him. When he filed in with my mother and a hospital psychiatrist he produced my suicide note, and said I was a danger to myself and others, and had been lying about everything for months.

The attending psychiatrist agreed I was clearly clinically depressed and prescribed Prozac. Once my father left, he sat down across from me and told me that my father’s psychiatrist was widely known as a quack, and that I would get the treatment I needed there.

I believed half of what he said.

I spent Thanksgiving that year in the hospital on suicide watch. At first, I was given a legal pad and pencil to write. Then the staff went through the werewolf story I wrote and deemed it too violent, so they took the pad and pencil away. I quickly learned there were right and wrong answers. Wrong answers involved talking about what my parents had done: that meant I was projecting, and avoiding responsibility for my actions. My fellow inmates cautioned me that too many wrong answers led to five point restraints, especially if I showed signs of anger. Right answers involved admitting that I had acted out in an unsafe and unhealthy manner and would henceforth manage my feelings according to guidelines I was told in group therapy.

So I confessed: my suicide note had been lashing out at my poor caring parents and was not serious. I had been spiraling in unhealthy behavior and taking my emotions out on others. I agreed that drugs were very bad and made everything worse, even though I hadn't taken any. The staff knew I was just saying what I thought they wanted to hear, and told my parents they weren't sure I was actually paying attention. But they also couldn't get me to say any wrong answers, so I did not technically represent a danger to myself or others. After a week of in-patient and a week of out-patient, I was discharged.

When I got out, my mother took me into the office room of her house and shut the door. She told me I was safe, that I could trust her, and that I should tell her the truth about what happened. For the first time in several weeks, I said more than a few terse phrases I knew I had to say to get out of inpatient. Haltingly, I described what had gone on in the psychiatrist’s office.

And then she cut me off: “But you had a choice about downloading Internet porn.”

I gaped at her, flummoxed, while she elaborated that I had deliberately sinned, that I had embarrassed and humiliated her. She kept repeating that it didn't matter what my father had said or done, I still had a choice, and I had chosen immoral things.

“But…he…hurt me,” I stammered, and collapsed to the floor, sobbing hysterically. She left me there, and I don't know how long I stayed on the floor. But when I got up I had several lessons seared deep in my brain:

Never, ever, ever talk. The truth is dangerous, and trust is a lie. I can't trust anyone. It's better to suffer, it's even better to die than to talk.

So I stopped talking. When I had to talk, I guessed what I was expected to say, and said it. It didn't matter that it wasn't the truth. It didn't matter that I was screaming on the inside, or that I daydreamed about killing myself every single day, sometimes hourly.

Both my parents understood that I had completely withdrawn from them, but regardless of what they tried, offered, or threatened, I gave the same therapy-sanitized non answers that had gotten me out of the hospital. I stopped writing on paper, and started using encryption on what I wrote on computers. I stopped acquiring possessions, and what little I had, I hid. Once my mother asked me why I was hiding my music from her, and I replied matter of factly that I hid everything from her.

I shut down around my younger siblings as well. After I left the hospital, both our parents interrogated them over anything I said to them, then confronted me with it to rattle me into talking. In one strange episode, my father berated me for not talking to my siblings, saying I should be a bigger part of their lives and confide in them. I smiled pleasantly, agreed with him, thanked him for telling me, and went back to cooking for my siblings, driving them to school and our mother's house, and not saying a single word more than I had to.

When words in my head grew too unbearable, I simply stopped making the words. I thought in pictures and symbols instead, and sometimes in math. Instead of remembering the root of my internal screaming in words, I pictured a nightmare version of myself, chained to a wall and locked in a basement, full of unbearable, never-ending rage. Over time, I stopped putting words to nearly every emotion and sensation I felt.

And I drank to drown it out. It wasn't like it was hard to acquire alcohol in a household where my father drank vodka in his coffee every morning. My father is an alcoholic, his father was an alcoholic, and by the time I first met Piper in our junior year of undergrad, I was an alcoholic. I drank to get to sleep, and when I woke up in the aborted REM cycle alcoholism causes, I drank myself back to sleep. I mostly drank alone, and when I went out with others, I usually left early to drink more in solitude. Someone first told me I had a problem to my face on election night of 2000, as I blew apart in a drunken rage at the results.

When I first went out with Piper, I got blackout drunk. We were in the same junior honors seminar for English, and I met her outside class while taking a refresher course at a bartending school. One of my time wasting hobbies since high school had been shooting pool, obsessing over angles and ricochets. So we went out to a bar with pool tables in downtown Los Angeles. She ordered one drink after another, sipped it, and gave it to me to finish. She laughed as she did it, calling me her “portable drink disposal.” After a few hours everything was a blur, and I woke up on the floor of my apartment the next morning.

Downing water over the hangover, I ruefully emailed Piper about drinking too much gin. She replied almost immediately:

“Gin is fascinating. It's amazing but also makes me want to die.”

And just like that, I was mesmerized.

That was the beginning of my marriage to Satan.