Confessions of a Sociopath (15 page)

The next day, everyone at the doctor’s office was very solicitous, calm, and soothing. They did some tests, and after the results came back, everything changed into rushing and accusations. The doctor said something in outraged tones about my white cell count. I could sense my mother receding into quiet, semicatatonic disavowal, the state she retreated to when my father punched things or screamed at her. The doctor was all questions—if I had felt pain, what I had been doing for the last ten days, and why I hadn’t spoken up sooner—the kind that suggested I had done something wrong, and I stopped answering them. I was bored and restless. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to be free to do my own thing instead of being a passive victim at the mercy of the well-intentioned. Someone asked me if I wanted to lie down; I politely declined and then passed out. When I came to, I heard shouting and my father convincing the medical staff not to order an ambulance. Even in my delirium I could sense their mistrust of him.

My dad would have done anything to get away from the reproachful stares. Behind my own fluttering, half-closed eyelids, I could see the wild panic in his eyes. It wasn’t panic about his
daughter dying. Or rather, it was. But it was the moral judgment of his friends and neighbors upon my dying rather than the loss of me that terrified him. That he would allow his daughter to die from neglect. That he and my mother had let me suffer in excruciating pain for more than a week without seeking any medical attention, because—as I discovered later—he had allowed our family’s medical insurance to lapse. To think of it now, I am surprised that he didn’t leave my mother and me there to sort it out ourselves. In a way, my mother was luckier than my father. Her oppression allowed her to escape responsibility; her powerlessness absolved her guilt.

When I woke up following surgery, I saw my dad standing over me with tired anger. He gave me the rundown: The appendix had perforated, spewing toxins into my guts. My insides had become septic with infection, and the muscles in my back had become gangrenous. The surgeons had to cut out chunks of rotted flesh, and a plastic tube was inserted in the wound to drain the pus out. There should be no lasting damage.

“You could have died. The doctors are very angry.” At me, his tone implied. It was as if I should have apologized to everyone.

Hospitals are, of course, dehumanizing places. The worst time of day is predawn, when the floors are especially cold and the daylight peeking through the blinds feels like a reckoning. The night nurses get replaced by the day nurses, fresh in their cheerful cartoon scrubs and eager to inflict their cruel practicalities. The gaggles of interns and doctors make their rounds, pulling curtains to examine and catalog flaccid, damaged flesh connected to tubes and machines—cyborgs in clinical phantasmagoria.

Stripped of your armor, you can embrace the savage that the hospital makes of you, or you can grasp desperately
for the human. For me, it was an easy choice. I was well acquainted with the savage in me—the animal that knew no other thing than its will to survive and thrive. I had no trouble turning off my sense of dignity or my need for connection, because I knew that to do so was the most efficient means of getting through the days ahead. There was also a sense of relief that I didn’t have to put on a mask for anyone. It saved me a lot of mental energy. Life was whittled down to the essentials—sleeping, eating, and defecating—interrupted by frequent physical violations that could be predicted and planned for. In this, I was a model patient. I did as I was told, dutifully doing my breathing exercises and taking my laps around the floor, hospital gown flapping open behind me. One nurse thought I was “brave.” I think she was talking about my steely-eyed, grin-and-bear-it kind of attitude. There were no tears, no complaints from me—a total lack of affect. In a victim, it is courage and thus admirable; in a predator, it is a lack of humanity and instills fear.

After about a week, I was scheduled to leave, as long as I maintained my upward wellness trajectory. The nurse told me that my final barrier to departure was the morning breakfast. Too nauseated to eat, I tried nibbling the foods with the highest volume-to-density ratio so it would look like I had downed more than I had, but it still appeared as if I hadn’t touched anything. In this instance, my dad saved me. He showed up an hour before he was due at a meeting, cramming pancakes into his mouth with one hand and flushing scrambled eggs down the toilet with the other.

On the way home, and with minutes to spare before my dad’s meeting, we swung by the music store to pick up a compact disc I had wanted. It was closed, but he pounded on the door until he got the attention of an employee, gestured toward
me with hurried explanations, and came back to the car with what I had asked for. People can surprise you.

I do not know how the family survived my hospital bills, but I am sure the same skills my dad used to get me my CD helped in getting out from under our enormous debt. When we got home, he walked me up the stairs and helped me into my bed, assuring me that someone would do something about my soaked bandages. He often said things like that, which were incredibly unlikely to actually happen.

My parents generally weren’t much more attentive to personal safety than I was. My family got into a surprising number of car accidents. When we were kids, we had a very serious accident on a dangerous mountain highway while on our way to visit my cousins. We got rear-ended (by someone who later appeared to be intoxicated), and the force propelled our car across several lanes of traffic until we collided with a concrete wall. Partly because us kids were all crammed into the back of the car, we all got pretty banged up, but for some reason, we didn’t turn back home and instead drove the rest of the ten hours that it took for us to get to our relatives’ house. I suspect we lived on the insurance proceeds from that accident for several years. Even now my first instinct upon being involved in an auto accident (usually not my fault; I’m a great driver) is to take a copious number of photos and solicit incriminating statements from the other driver.

I had been climbing on moving vehicles since I was little. I would climb onto moving vehicles, climb around already moving vehicles, and even once tried climbing under a moving vehicle. I loved to ride in the backs of trucks, dangling off.

When I was ten years old, a family friend asked my older brother Jim and me to operate an eight-passenger, gas-powered golf cart to shuttle guests to and from a Halloween
party hosted about a half mile away from the parking area. We were polite and safe when taking passengers up to the house but performed increasingly risky acts on the way back down. On one trip, I was attempting to climb along the roof from the back of the golf cart to the front. My brother wasn’t paying attention and when he didn’t see me, he assumed that he had left me back at the house. He made a sharp U-turn and I went flying off the roof, barrel-rolling for several seconds along the pavement. I lost consciousness and woke up on my back, red tail-lights rapidly coming my direction. My brother (still unaware of what had happened) was backing up as part of a three-point turn and I just missed being run over by rolling out of the way.

“Where’d you go?” my brother asked, surprised, when I climbed back into the cart.

“I don’t know. Nowhere,” I replied.

Driving my own motor vehicle wasn’t any less hazardous. One afternoon my mother introduced me to what would become, $1,200 later, my first car. The car was a beautiful disaster—a 1972 Pontiac “Luxury” LeMans, V-8 engine with dual mufflers coming out the back. The car was viscerally appealing, a sister of the GTO with a nearly identical body. It was the last year that the Pontiac maintained its curvy form, mimicking the musculature of the animals that cars of that era were frequently named after (Mustang, Charger, Cougar). The Pontiac’s dual round headlights stared back at you; its grill and bumper sneered. Its fenders were rusted out by the wheel wells and the only thing saving the roof from rust was the white vinyl top. The best feature in my mother’s eyes, though, was the Detroit steel. She believed that in an accident the other person would feel the hurt, not me. I proved this intuition to be accurate many times in my first few years with it.

The engine to my car was so simple that I did my own small
repairs and tweaks. I wanted to understand how it worked. I wanted to control it, not the other way around. When the starter went out one year while I was at college, I enlisted my boyfriend to help me replace it where it was stalled in a friend’s apartment complex parking lot. I had no idea how to do it and neither did he, but I was always willing to try new things no matter how ill advised. Everything was going well until we began to disconnect the starter from the car before detaching the battery. Sparks started flying, catching the undercarriage on fire. We both quickly got out from under the car and I had to throw snow on the flames to put them out.

I got a lot of attention in that car, some of it lewd, but I never felt vulnerable in it—I always felt invincible. I learned how to handle its power, how to accelerate into turns, how to launch it off the line while drag-racing it with friends, and how to fishtail it in California rainstorms, which, due to their rarity, made roads especially slick from accumulated gas and oil.

I loved the confidence and power I felt with that car, because it was such a contrast to the dissonance of being female, teenage, and powerless. My brothers were closer to my daredevil personality than my sisters, with their mild games of dolls and house. They would go off to their church Boy Scout groups and shoot arrows and skulk around the woods with knives, and my equivalent Mormon female activities were cross-stitching homilies for pillowcases, baking snickerdoodles, and anything that involved the use of a glue gun. In general, the women in my life seemed like they were never acting, always being acted upon.

When I was in my tween years, men started telling me how much I looked like my mother. I correctly interpreted that to mean that I had started to become an object of sexual desire. By the time I was ten, I had already developed full plump
breasts and my hips had the contours of a Greek vase. Men openly leered, their aggression palpable. The adult women in the world treated me like I was a slut, even though I had no idea why. And so my new body was primarily a liability at first. If I wasn’t careful, it functioned like a suicide bomb, with collateral damage in the form of judgment from women and harassment from men.

I understand that all teenage girls experience some variation of this awkward transition between child and sex object. Even so, I think in a lot of ways it’s much worse for someone like me—a budding sociopath. All I wanted was power and control. If I were a boy, I thought, I would be big and muscled. I would cut an imposing presence. I was always athletic, always aggressive for a girl. Even in male-dominated physical activities like mosh pits, I held my own through sheer antagonism. But I was also five foot three and 125 pounds. I wanted fear and respect but what I typically ended up with were unwanted advances from inebriated guys twice my size. I did not look like a predator, I looked like an attractive target for unsolicited and aggressive forms of attention. I was a strong, tough girl, but men were generally stronger and tougher. I was extraordinarily smart and conniving, but it was oftentimes not enough to vanquish the authority of adults half as smart and not nearly as conniving as me. It’s not that I did not feel female so much as I did not feel as weak as I looked.

I have never identified very much with my gender, or at least, I have been extraordinarily ambivalent. But a lot of girls go through similar phases of rejection of and rebellion from gender stereotypes. When you grow up as a girl, it is like there are faint chalk lines traced approximately three inches around your entire body at all times, drawn by society and often religion and family and particularly other women, who somehow
feel invested in how you behave, as if your actions reflect directly on all womanhood. These chalk lines circumscribe the manner in which you interact with the world, are the source of the implicit “for a girl” that seems to trail every compliment (“tough, for a girl”). You want to wave your arms around as hard as you can to wipe them away and scatter them to dust, but the chalk lines just follow you around, always keeping you inside that constant three inches of space. I felt that the label of
girl
was too limiting to contain my own grandiose conception of myself, and so I mostly ignored it.

There were obviously good things about my gender. My mother was largely passive with my father, but if she ever wanted something, all it took was a simple touch, a half promise of physical pleasure, to get him to do almost anything she wanted. In those hundreds of times when men told me my mother was beautiful, I eventually saw not just objectification but the power of dearly hoped-for pleasures. I have sometimes heard men lament that women have all of the power because they are the ones who say yes or no to sex. But I wasn’t yet ready to deploy that kind of power. In my high school years, while other girls were learning about and experimenting with their sexuality, I was largely asexual. I didn’t understand then that sex could be something that could give me pleasure. And I didn’t understand it as a way of connecting to people, and therefore gaining a form of power over them. I didn’t know that sex was a means to love, and that people will do anything for love.

I did, however, use my gender to great effect with many of my disgusting, perverted teachers. One of them I hated in particular. My high school English teacher had given me a failing grade on one of my assignments because my mother had turned it in for me on a day I’d been away at a softball
tournament or drum competition. He ridiculed me in front of the class for having my “mommy bring it,” trying to make an example of me. This teacher was old and vindictively petty. I never liked him. I had seen him ruthlessly attack other students in my class, so I never gave him any reason to target me. Still, there was something about my silent defiance that must have gotten under his skin, because he finally made up something plausible to attack me on.