Angry Enough to Write

by Susan Cameron

I was going to write something new specifically for Tasty Sauce, but once again I got caught up in Inspector Gadget's blog. This time the topic was a 6-year-old gypsy girl named Dawn being repeatedly raped by her father. Dawn's mother had been given to Dawn's father by HER father as payment for a debt. The police had removed Dawn and turned her over to Social Services; the Crown Prosecution Service said there wasn't enough evidence to convict her father; Social Services put her back in the house. More cops with more horror stories chimed in. Bear with me:

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163 said on July 31 @2:43: "A long time ago, it would have been 1994 or 1995, I found a kid, about two years old, at a house where a drug dealer had been in a fight with another drug dealer. With an axe. There was claret and syringes everywhere. Mum, who was a tom with an epic crack habit, was wandering around in a main road with the baby.

I took the kid into police protection. The world went mad. Like I was some sort of lunatic. I was in my twenties and gave a shit. The social worker, who released the kid back into the mum’s custody sharpish, told me “not to project my middle class values” onto the family. First time I’d been told I was middle class, funnily enough, because my avowedly working class parents would have done exactly the same thing."

(my response)

This got me thinking about a man long ago who projected his supposedly "middle class values" and didn't feel the least bit ashamed of it.

General William Napier, an administrator during the Raj, had this to say to the Indians about the practice of suttee, according to Wikipedia:

"This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

My understanding is that suttee pretty much disappeared on Napier's watch.

Hanging has gone out of fashion, but wouldn't it be nice if the Prime Minister and Members of Parliament collectively said:

"The raping of children is your custom, as is trading and selling female relatives as property, and robbery, and burglary, and mayhem. But our nation has also a custom. We arrest, try, convict and sentence to prison anyone caught doing any of those things. We shall therefore begin a prison-building project, and keep you in those prisons until you are long past breeding age. Let us all act according to our customs. And, by the way, you might want to leave while you still can."

But, no. If anything, our leaders have spent the last few decades apologizing for western civilization's rules, laws, customs and expectations, not defending them. You know what I'd really like to hear, just once?

"Listen up. I'm supposed to respect your cultural differences, but you don't actually have anything resembling a culture. I could find a superior culture growing in the tank of a portajohn in the Mojave desert in August. You have the human compassion and morality of a rabid wolverine. I don't care about your thoughts and opinions any more -- I ate a bowl of corn flakes this morning that was smarter than you. Here's the deal. We have a pile of laws, most of which are variations on this theme: Do unto others as you would have them do unto to you. This is the one sentence that separates civilization from barbarism. Violate this fundamental principal, and we will remove you from our civilization. Got it? Don't worry. If you don't get it, you will understand SOON."

Okay. I'm stepping away from the keyboard. I believe there is another glass of pinot with my name on it in the kitchen. Apologies for the length of the comment, but I swear, it's either post this, or blow up at random like a badly wired IED. Thanks in advance for your tolerance.

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And now I thank you for yours. It's too bad something has to make me angry enough to write, but if that's the rocket fuel I need, so be it!

copyright Susan Cameron 2011

East Side Story

by Susan Cameron

"Dave got really mad at me when I told him he shouldn't smoke dope near the kids any more, but I don't think I'm wrong. A contact high can't be good for little kids," says Elizabeth. Sarah and I nod our agreement, mouths full of Elizabeth's homemade chocolate chip cookies. Little Jimmy had just turned two, and baby Carly's nine months old. We know smoking dope in front of children must be a bad thing; there isn't a mother on TV who'd put up with it.

The three of us are eating cookies, drinking milk, and listening to George Harrison's latest album, the one to benefit Bangladesh. It seems incredible that people are starving to death in the 1970's, as if we were still in the Dark Ages. I feel a little twinge of guilt about eating the cookies, but that doesn't stop me.

The kids are down for their naps, so the music's too quiet to fully appreciate the power of Dave's stereo system, but that's OK with us. The music's not drowning out our talking. We're in the living room of Dave and Elizabeth's HUD house. HUD stands for Housing and Urban Development. It's a government agency that sells dilapidated houses in dangerous neighborhoods to unqualified people who will never pay for them.

Elizabeth married Dave and gave birth to Jimmy six months later, the week she turned seventeen. At eighteen she had Carly, and that's about the time I entered the picture. Dave supplements his boxboy income by dealing on the side; I like kids, and I'm willing to baby-sit for nicely rolled joints instead of money. It works out for everybody.

I like Elizabeth. She's a misplaced earth mother hippie girl -- she struggles to grow vegetables in the dead ghetto dirt in her backyard, she cooks way better than the rest of us, she loves fussing over her kids. We all think Dave is attractive. He is tall and cadaverously thin, with long, dark hair and skin so white it's almost blue, like ice on the Detroit River in February. He looks like he should be the lead guitarist in some famous rock-and-roll band, and he does play guitar, but badly. We decide he looks kind of like James Taylor on the cover of the Mud Slide Slim album, except Dave used to do a lot of speed and is far, far skinnier than James Taylor, who does heroin. And Dave has a couple of bad teeth you can see when he smiles, but you don't see them often.

"The thing is, I know Dave really loves me, and I know he really loves the kids, but sometimes he just doesn't think," says Elizabeth. "He gets mad and says things he doesn't really mean. He says, 'You know smoking weed mellows me out, you know I need it so I can stand to be around these crying rug rats, and you just want to hassle me!' but I'm not trying to hassle him, I just don't want the kids to get high, that's all. And then I get really angry because he calls Jimmy and Carly rug rats, and I yell at him, and then we start really arguing, and he yells and screams and slams the door when he leaves, and the kids are crying, and then I start crying too, and I'm tired of him coming home stoned and sorry sorry sorry all the time, you know?" The last two words come out all quavery, and she grabs the empty cookie plate and heads for the kitchen so we won't see the tears in her eyes, and Sarah and I pretend we don't notice them. Elizabeth comes back with her famous oatmeal raisin cookies this time, but my stomach doesn't feel quite right and I don't want any, although they're my favorites.

Sarah's the one who blurts out the question. "Has Dave tried to hurt Jimmy again?"

A long silence. My stomach is really hurting now. Elizabeth sighs. "No. It was just that one time. He kept all his appointments with the therapist, just like the judge said, and the social worker doesn't have to come around any more. The doctor said Jimmy's fracture healed perfectly, the arm is fine." She takes a deep breath. "But I'm worried. Dave says weed does him more good than therapy ever did, and I know he's getting high at work behind the grocery store with the other guys. What if the boss catches him? What if he loses his job? We're not making payments on this house now as it is, and Dave's spending all the rent money we collect from our tenants downstairs. I don't know where the hell it's all going, and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do," and she loses it.

She's sobbing, and Sarah's holding her, and I'm holding her, making inadequate comforting noises, when Jimmy stumbles out awakened from his nap, sucking his thumb and clutching his blankie, and he sees his mother crying, pulls out his thumb and starts wailing, which wakes up his sister, who starts wailing, and it sounds like the air raid sirens the city of Detroit tests on the first Saturday of the month to give us time to kiss our asses good-bye when the Russians finally nuke us. Loud. It is loud. I wouldn't break my baby's arm for crying, though, and my stomach wrenches again, and I realize what I'm feeling in my guts is rage, and I want to beat Dave unconscious. We all snuggle together on the couch, everybody calmed down and cuddling like a litter of exhausted puppies.

So it's no big surprise when Elizabeth and the kids show up on my doorstep the following week. We make up my ex-roommate's bed in the dining room. It's only a double, but the kids are so small that all three of them can fit. Sarah and Patty and Mary Ann drop by. We pop a half a ton of popcorn and read Cat in the Hat aloud way too many times, and after the kids are asleep we talk about men and life and the future and lots of other things we don't know anything about.

It's also no big surprise when Elizabeth calls Dave a few days later, they make up, and he comes to take her and the kids home. This is the first time they break up and make up, but it's far from the last. The pattern develops: Dave loses his temper, yells, throws things; Elizabeth fears for the safety of the kids and brings them to my place; Dave cools down, apologizes; Elizabeth goes back to him. This cycle repeats itself for almost two years. Our little circle of friends no longer find Dave attractive.

"Thanks for taking care of my family again, Sue," says Dave, his eyes skidding off my face and landing somewhere behind my right shoulder.

"No problem, Dave." I smile, looking straight at the eyes not looking at mine. Punkass.

It's a very steep staircase leading to my second-story walk-up. As he begins his descent I have the urge to give his bony back a hard shove, watch the scrawny rooster try to fly -- "Squawk! Squa..." as he hits bottom and his skinny neck snaps, stringy carcass fit only for a long, slow simmer in a stewpot -- but I don't. Booting his ass is his wife's job, not mine; and after our friend Sarah tells Elizabeth in exasperation to shit or get off the pot, Elizabeth finally succumbs to the inevitable, and the marriage is over.

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Things we don't know at the time: Dave will make his court-ordered child support payments until he falls in love with another stoned, skinny boxboy and runs away with him. Elizabeth will take her children and move to a farm in upstate Michigan where welfare payments stretch farther. She will marry a truck driver with two children whose wife abandoned them to run away with a musician, a really bad guitar player. They will have a son together. They will divorce. Time will pass, and I will lose track of everybody.

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I went through some old Detroit photographs the other day. There are Jimmy and Carly on their red-and-yellow plastic Big Wheels, huge smiles, showing off, tearing around the cracked asphalt driveway the weeds were destroying. There's Elizabeth smiling at the camera in front of the peeling yellow garage, all that long dark wavy hair, good-natured hippie gypsy in bellbottoms and bare feet. And there's me. I am nineteen years old, about to turn twenty. I recognize the earrings I'm wearing in the photograph; they're at the bottom of my jewelry box now. The gold wore off and they turn my earlobes green, so I don't wear them any more, but I keep them just the same. I am sitting on Elizabeth's rickety back porch steps with that damned broken ripped screen door behind me, the one that always banged shut and startled me no matter how many times I heard it. Carly is sitting on my right knee with my arm wrapped around her. She has one tiny hand on mine, the other on my leg, and her mouth is open, laughing loud. My other arm is around Jimmy on my left, and his around me, and he's smiling. We're all happy, our three blond heads gleaming in the high-noon sunshine of a perfect late spring day. They have my hair. They have my hazel eyes. They have my nose. How can this be? They look like my children, and I stare at the faces that look like mine and wonder if I could have done more to help them. They even have my smile, three identical smiles for Elizabeth, the black swan mother of the golden chicks, behind my camera, taking the picture.

Susan Cameron, copyright 1999