Katie Beers (10 page)

Relieving myself and trying to clean myself was a disgusting and humiliating ordeal. Of all the painful memories, this one hurts most. And it’s strange because looking back, I know I was subjected to far worse. And yet this turns my stomach still. Of course, I had no bathroom or shower. John had left a commode in the bigger room of the dungeon with a black plastic bag in it, but it was attached to nothing. I had no access to it, being chained at the neck, or so Big John thought. Each time he left, he locked me inside the smaller box. Big John thought that I couldn’t get out, so I couldn’t sneak out to use the commode, leaving him a putrid sign of my escape. So I did what I had to do so as not to rouse his suspicions. In the little box, there was the thin mattress, handcuffs on the side walls, the neck chain, that horrible wooden head box and a television. Under the TV, there was an area that the mattress was not covering—this is where I would go. And the bottom part of the blanket was all I had to clean myself. To this day, I must have a bathroom close at hand so as never to be reminded of the shame of a pile of one’s own excrement at the foot of one’s own bed. I am actually quite embarrassed sharing this, even though, for the first ten years of my life, I had become almost immune to humiliation and neglect.

One of my earliest childhood memories is a snowy winter day when I was really young. I must have been only two or three years old. Aunt Linda had just bathed me and Marilyn was coming to pick me up at the Inghilleris’. Aunt Linda instructed me when Marilyn came I was to say to her that I wanted to stay over. I did as directed. But Marilyn wasn’t about to follow Linda’s orders. Marilyn announced that I could not spend the night and that she was going to take me home. That’s when voices got loud and pots started flying.

The story Linda later drilled into my head was that Marilyn had a headache and dropped me off one day when I was two months old and didn’t come back for me for weeks. Marilyn’s version was that, yes, she had a headache, but that when she tried to pick me up, Linda put up a fight. At this point, it was all out war.

Aunt Linda screamed at Marilyn, “She is not going home with you, she is my daughter! I am not allowing her to go with you.”

Marilyn yelled back she was going to get the police. I was crying, begging Aunt Linda to let me go home with Marilyn. Aunt Linda then ordered Sal to get me out of the room, adding, “If I have anything to do with it, you’ll never see Marilyn again!”

Sal shut me in Aunt Linda’s bedroom. But I didn’t stay put. I pried the door opened and watched as Aunt Linda threw pots and pans at Marilyn and anything else that she could fling. Sal joined in hurling chairs and a lamp at Marilyn, trying to kick her down the apartment stairs. I was screaming to stop hurting Marilyn. Marilyn’s glasses fell off. She screeched that she couldn’t see, but Sal yelled back he didn’t give a crap; she was not going to take me away from Linda.

When Marilyn finally found her glasses, they were shattered—she couldn’t see. Marilyn left me inside and stormed out the door. She ran to the next door neighbor’s house and called the cops. The neighbors allowed her to stay there until police arrived but when they did, the Inghilleri house was dark. Aunt Linda had locked the doors and turned off all of the lights. The cops had to break through the front door. Aunt Linda was holding me, hostage-style, with her arms wrapped around my arms shouting “Marilyn cannot have
my
daughter.”

Marilyn told the cops that I was actually
her
daughter and that she was going to take me home. She did. I don’t have any memory of how Linda and Marilyn made peace after that battle, but I bear the battle scar: fear and skepticism of the people who say they are protecting me. It was also the first time I knew Sal was really bad news.

The story of the Inghilleris in my life begins with a five dollar cab ride. I have always been told that Aunt Linda was one of Marilyn’s customers. Marilyn gave Aunt Linda a ride home, but Linda couldn’t scrounge up the few dollars to pay. Pay back was simple: a phone number scribbled on the back of a match book and an I.O.U.

By age three, Aunt Linda was around as much as Marilyn and I didn’t call either one “Mom.” That title was reserved for Linda’s mother, Ann Butler. I was at “Mom’s” house in Bay Shore when I almost drowned. “Mom” had an above-ground swimming pool. Aunt Linda knew that I was not able to swim—everyone knew that I couldn’t swim—no one cared. Aunt Linda left me alone in “Mom’s” pool on a raft without any sort of flotation device—and warned me that I’d drown if I fell in.

Of course, I fell in. I was clinging to the raft, trying to make as much noise as I could so that maybe “Mom” or Aunt Linda would hear me and run over to save me. Finally they came down the stairs. There did not appear to be any rush as I bobbed up and down swallowing pool water and frantically struggling to hold on. I was sure I was going to die. I wasn’t going to make it out. Aunt Linda leaned in the pool, reached for the raft, pulled it to the edge and lifted me out. It seemed to me she didn’t want to get wet.

I almost drowned at the beach also. Linda’s sister had me at Jones Beach, on the south shore. She was holding my hand—but a gigantic wave came and knocked me over. I was under water struggling to get up for long enough to think it was the end for me. Looking back, I realize the constant message was I was on my own—sink or swim—literally. The word “careless” comes to mind. There was no care for me by anyone in my life.

At around five years old, the Inghilleris had Aunt Linda’s brother Charlie over with his girlfriend Michelle. I don’t know what I was doing to annoy them, but I did something that they didn’t like, so Sal and Linda threw me in the pantry closet and locked the door. As I was being tugged by the shirt and pushed into the closet, I pleaded to first let me use the bathroom. The answer was no. The closet door slammed shut.

I was in the closet for hours, banging on the door, crying hysterically.

“If you don’t knock it off, Katie—we’re leaving the house. You’ll stay in there till you calm the hell down!” Sal pressed his fat cheek against the door to bellow.

I sat in there—in the pitch black —curled up in a ball—trying to hold my bladder—crying. They left the house and headed to a movie theater, keeping me locked in the pantry closet. When Sal and Aunt Linda
returned from the movie hours later, they unlocked the door and found me on the closet floor covered in pee. Aunt Linda beat me until I was purple.

It was there, in that rented mustard yellow house on Belmont Avenue in West Babylon, that Sal first showed me his true colors. I was sick with a bad cold. Linda left the house to buy me cough medicine at the drug store. I remember I was playing with my Barbie dolls—and Sal sat down on the floor next to me. I was barely old enough to speak in sentences, and yet I could formulate the thought that it was strange because Sal had never ever taken any interest in me or Barbie dolls before. I don’t remember his words but I remember what he did. He touched me under my underwear. I was maybe two or three years old. I don’t remember how it started, but I do know when he was finished, I felt really ashamed and embarrassed like I had done a bad thing. Linda came home with cough medicine and the cough, I assume, cleared up quickly. The abuse would escalate for years.

Everyone was scared of Sal. My grandmother, my mother, Linda, and my brother John. He smacked them all around. But it was my brother, who is a bit more than six years older than I am, who took a big share of Sal’s wrath. One day, Sal shouted to John to mow the lawn to which John replied that that he was busy and that he would take care of it later. Sal yelled at him and told him to get his ass outside and to get the lawn mowed. John yelled back that Sal was not his father and had no right to tell him what to do. The shouting went back and forth—John threatened to leave—that he had enough of Sal’s bullshit. Sal ended it definitively—he grabbed John and threw him to the ground and kicked him square in his gut with such force it knocked the wind out of John. My big brother was as helpless as I was against Sal’s terror.

When Sal wasn’t getting what he wanted, he would also grab me by the shirt near the collar and “jack” me against the wall, holding me there with my feet dangling below me like a ragdoll, pointing in my face with his other hand, spitting curses inches from my eyes. When his arms got tired, he would drop me and wrap his hands around my neck.

There was no escape from Sal. My grandmother, Helen Beers, owned a house at 12 Higbie Drive in West Islip. She and her husband, Stewart, had built the house and raised Marilyn and my Uncle Bob there. My mother, brother and I all lived there with her. We each had our own bedroom. My grandmother and I each had a room on the bottom floor;
John and Marilyn’s rooms were upstairs. One day, Sal and Aunt Linda came over and told us that they had been evicted from their house. Marilyn offered for them to stay with us for as long as they needed to. When Sal and Aunt Linda moved in, Grandma kept her downstairs bedroom, John and Sal shared my old room, Marilyn kept her room, and Aunt Linda took over John’s room upstairs. I was left to share Linda’s bed, but when I missed her curfew and didn’t arrive in her room at her designated time, there was hell to pay. Being late meant being locked out—and becoming Sal’s prey.

Aunt Linda’s rule was firm. If I was not upstairs by nine at night, I was not allowed to sleep in the bed. If I did not make it upstairs in time, I had to sleep on the couch in the living room and Sal would have his way with me. I would often awake to Sal hanging over me, taking off my underwear. He would lie next to me masturbating and touching me. He would rub up against me and touch me, and then it became me touching him. He would tell me what to do, sometimes holding my hand to show me. It went on like this for a while. Later, if I didn’t make it up to bed with Aunt Linda, Sal would come hunting for me in the house. When he found me, he would turn me over and lay me on my stomach. He would take off my underwear and start to rub his dick in my buttocks, never penetrating me this way. I guess he just used it to get off. It went on for years like this—at first once a week and then every day. Eventually —when it was clear he wouldn’t get caught —he began to rape me.

Marilyn was never there at night. She spent the nightshift caring for an old woman. She needed to work more than one job because she was the only one in the house earning a dime. So there was no one to turn to. Sal knew the nine o’clock rule and would deliberately delay me.

When he was finished, Sal would pull my underwear up and tell me to clean myself up. He would always escort me to the bathroom and watch me while I cleaned up. He would do the same then walk out and return to his La-Z Boy chair in the living-room, lean back and crack open a can of beer.

Aunt Linda’s rule got even stiffer. If I went upstairs too late, even if she were awake, she would send me back downstairs saying, “You didn’t listen; you were supposed to be up here ten minutes ago.” There were times that I would sleep on the floor behind the couch, hoping that Sal
wouldn’t be able to find me. There were times that I would accidentally fall asleep on the couch, and I would awake to Sal grunting at me to roll over or giving me some other command, not to move, to keep quiet, no talking, hold still while he penetrated me. Grandma Helen was right down the hall on the same floor but never heard a thing. I’d pretend to be asleep while he raped me, night after night. I thought if I would pretend to be sleeping, Sal would leave me alone. It didn’t happen that way. When he would finish, he would shake me and tell me to go clean myself up. I have memories of waking with my underwear soaked, and I didn’t pee myself. Sal was using my body as I slept.

I started to beg my grandmother to allow me to sleep in bed with her. Sometimes she let me. I felt safe there. But it was short lived. Sal then realized where I was sleeping and would come wake me up and make me come out and “play” with him. It was always in whispers. Whispered threats.

As Sal started to feel more comfortable with abusing me, he started to do it during the day. I would start to avoid coming home from school because I knew what was going to happen as soon as I arrived. Sal would ask me to come to his bedroom. As I slowly took steps across the linoleum tile floor, he would gesture to me to come closer, over to his bed. There, with his enormous pot belly and erection sticking up, he would lay with no pants on. Then he would tell me to play with him. I was seven years old and this was my daily routine.

As his confidence that he wouldn’t get caught increased, so did the abuse. He raped me on a regular basis. I don’t recall anymore how often it was, but it seemed like it was more than once a week, for years. When he raped me, I always had to be on top because he was an obese man and would have probably crushed me. Sal would make me use lotion when he would make me play with him—he kept the lotion right next to his bed or in the closet in the bedroom. Lubriderm. I would sneak into Sal’s room when he was not home and steal the lotion, hoping that if he didn’t have the lotion, then he wouldn’t make me play with him. It didn’t work. I would throw it in the dumpster in the strip mall but a new bottle would always appear. When I saw it there, I would cry my eyes out.

Aunt Linda, who never left the house, rarely left her upstairs
bedroom. There, she spent hours on the phone. She ran up my grandmother’s phone bill over one thousand dollars. She was calling the “900” numbers that you see on late night TV. Aunt Linda and Sal never slept in the same room, or even associated with each other. Aunt Linda would call the “900” numbers and talk “dirty” on the phone. I would hear her talking, saying what she was wearing, talking about her body and of course lying about how sexy she looked. In fact, she looked like a bull dog with massive rolls of fat. She would spend her days and nights on the phone talking to anonymous voices on three-dollars-per-minute hotlines.

“I’m sleeping next to a little girl,” she told one of the men, trying to sound sexy. It was four in the morning and I was pretending to sleep.

Aunt Linda shook my shoulder and ordered me up to speak to the man.

“He wants YOU,” she barked.