Rubbernecking Delays

Tell them.

Do I have to?

Why wouldn’t you?

Why wouldn’t I? Because at this stage of my life, I’d rather forget. Too many years of therapy; too many self help books. Want to see the loose pages? Anyway, there are enough of those stories out there already. Who needs to read another salacious broken home, abused childhood tale.

Oh they do. They can’t get enough of it.

And why is that?

Schadenfreude.

What the hell does that mean?

Inequity aversion. It’s German.

Can you be more specific?

Enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Should we delve further into that definition or do you get it?

Yeah, I can actually say I get it. Guilty. Admittedly, I’m a rubbernecker. I was about 8 years old in the car with HER on the Belt Parkway when I first discovered rubbernecking delays. I asked. “Mommy. What are rubbernecking delays? She told me, “When drivers slow down to gawk at a traffic accident. I started to laugh not only at the word gawk, and asked her if she was telling me some kind of joke.

“I’m dead serious,” she said. Stop laughing.

I didn’t press when she told me to shut up. I just looked out at all the rubberneckers and I thought; How is this OK and what are all those people looking for when they look at a wreck? It was too much for my 8 year old brain to process. I wanted to ask my mother; So you're telling me these people driving are doing the wrong thing and there is a sign as proof, basically a part of the rules of the road. Is that OK, and should they get away with it? I knew better than to ask.

So you get it. Come on. Be a sport. I have a sneaky suspicion you have a macabre story to tell. And I know a part of you wants to tell it.

I really don’t. And trust me that’s a good thing. But let me do this, just for fun, because I like you, and because I think you really want me to share, let’s play a game. I’ll give you a few scenarios, and you get to decide which one of them is about me.

Game on.

How ’bout a Lutheran pastor came to counsel a drunk mother and she coaxed him into her bedroom. The child in the house heard the moaning and thought her mother was getting hurt, so she opened the door and saw them both naked.

Or how ’bout a drunk mother picked her daughter and two friends up from the school dance and played chicken with every tree on every curve on the way home until they crashed into a ditch.

How ’bout a drunk mother that regularly beat her daughter with a metal hairbrush. The school nurse would ask about the prickly wounds and the child would lie and say she suffered from a rare skin rash.

How ’bout a drunk mother that twisted her hands around her daughter’s braids until she fell down on the floor in pain, continuously smashing her face into the linoleum floor.

How ’bout a drunk mother that was a pedophi….

Stop. Enough. No. Don’t stop. Is there more?

Yes.

It’s ALL about you, right?

Maybe, maybe not. Actually you’ve gotten me in the mood and this is kind of fun. I’ve warned you before, stories like this can be depressing. Do you or don’t you want me to continue? Do you want to talk recipes instead?

No. We are not talking about food today. Stop deflecting and I will too. You said you wanted to play, so let’s play. You know I can handle it and so can they. I don’t think it’s necessary to confirm or deny to you or to them if any of the above actually happened to me.

Actually, it just came to my mind that I used to write all this sappy shit about what happened to me. At one time, I might even have considered some of my writing good. Either way, it was therapeutic. But whatever happened to me happened so long ago, whatever I wrote, I no longer care to reread it.

Why don’t you give us a taste of the writing? Come on. Just a little.

No.

Why not?

It’s useless information now. Irrelevant.

I disagree. You already admitted to Schadenfreude. You are an admitted rubbernecker. Spill..

Alright, alright, since you’ve gotten me in a mood, here is a taste. I think when I wrote this I was reading Virginia Wolff, or some other stream of consciousness. I wrote this many years after the abuse, long after SHE was dead with one particular incident of abuse in mind. Catch a glimpse of this sappy shit. You asked.

Sunlight failed to penetrate the murky curtains at three o'clock in the afternoon. Broad daylight, on a June afternoon simply desired to pirouette with the living, but instead the light, as it fought its way through the peephole of the front door, found the face of death holding ironic iniquity. The one who lay dead on the cold slate floor of the entryway never saw it coming, the puppet master's final flaw. The one who stood victorious above her was momentarily pleased with her bare hands when they took over and choked the life out of the one who gave her life. But the piper always commands a payday. Liberated, the dust motes seemed to celebrate as they danced their way around the room. Once settled, the shedding of combined DNA mixed with indeterminable dirt remained, irreconcilably scattered.

Left turn, yup you just made a big left turn here. Stream of something or whatever, dark, but I like it. Do you mind telling me what is going on here? What was it that inspired this?

What the hell, since you say you like it, just this once for them, but I mean it, I really don’t want to talk about the past anymore. I’m tapped out, really, but let’s let them have it.

I actually tried to choke my mother to death, I think. I sort of blacked out. For a minute I thought I had it in me to become a murderer. Jerry Springerish enough for you? I was 15 and after a decade of extreme abuse, I had come home from school one day and went right up to my room like I always did to find anything and everything that mattered to me destroyed, crushed and littered all over my room, the poems my boyfriend wrote, my Elton John records, my artwork, my old teddy bear. I picked up the stuffing on my way out the door and a small glass eye on a mission to find HER.

SHE was near the front door. I don’t know why because she rarely went out. Maybe she sensed the impending doom and wanted out, or more likely she was expecting a liquor delivery. I pushed her up against the foyer closet door and put my hand around her throat squeezing and squeezing the life out of her pounding her into the door. “Why why why,” was all I said, and then I spit in her face and released her. She fell to the floor and looked up at me with the fear in her eyes that she could have seen coming from me all those years, if she bothered to look. It was the first and last time I attacked her. I fought back. And it felt so right and so wrong. I ran away from home that night. It was over. And I was safe. Or was I, because those of us that know this rodeo, we Jerry Springer show wannabes, most of us make it out but we are tossed into adulthood having never had a childhood, broken.

I don’t know what to say.

Don’t say anything. Shit happens. I’m good. Really. My scars are a badge of honor these days. All hope is not dead. Mitfreude.

Oh haha. Now it’s you going all German on me. I’ll bet you looked that word up.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Since you wrangled me into playing this game. What can I say? I like antonyms. Reversals. You tell them what mitfreude means.

Mitfreude. To delight in or share in someone else’s happiness. Ahhh. Treffer. Touché.

But I will make no promises when it comes to driving out there on the open road. Understand?

Verstehen.