PTSD part 1

It was dark by the time I got on CA-168 and as windy as the road is, I don’t recall that about my first trip up. I remember a straight road, dark on all sides, and then up a hill. I had secured a room with a man in his late thirties named R.

I arrived to deep barks from the three pit bulls. The motion activated light carved out a hollow in the darkness. The mud caked my shoes as I strolled beside the square concrete step stones. I could discern the vibrant green moss clinging to the exposed boulders and the trees, leafless but heavy and wet. There was something about this place that activated a terrible fear in me.

Within one day I was giving family and friends my physical address. I was worried I would disappear and with no friends in the area, no one would come looking. I’d slip into the long darkness trailing behind the double-wide, maybe into the abyssal stomach of Snow Chief, the scarred and sun blistered pit-bull with an infection where the barbed choke collar mauled his neck. R, with his pot belly and heavy upper-torso, the delicately sculpted chin-strap and miniature ponytail, he’d feed me to the animal.

R showed me a photograph he took of Snow Chief out on the property while he was smoking weed. Before the foaming stream, surrounded by moss, the gnarled beast with his thin white hair and pink skin; muted, his head downward and vulnerable. A lens flare broke above him like some lantern over a religious icon.

I knew this dog had killed, as R had told me, saying it was really put on Snow Chief. He was forced into the situation R said, but once a pit bull killed well, that was that. The list I tabulated in my head of the animals the dog killed went on and on, other dogs and goats. My hopes of getting a dog for myself were squashed.

R described beating Snow Chief with a two-by-four, the dog’s mouth a vice around a weaker female.

There was an acute sexual energy seething from R’s shabby doublewide. I couldn’t pinpoint its origin, but fought off an extraordinarily powerful demon enlivened by the perverse essence of that place. I would’ve run out of there sooner but for my inability to distinguish whether or not the immanent threat I perceived was elemental and imaginary.

As three hour long panic attacks became a nightly occurrence, my mother was desperate for me to persevere. My father offered the unslanted support that has become his m.o. I asked Mark, my dream analyst and he told me to trust my instincts, even if the threat wasn’t real.

Though my adverseness to potent masculine energy would have to be dealt with, I did not have to deal with it through this man and his blistered pit bull.

I don’t think I was being entirely delusional.

There was a base distrust between R and I. I grew more unnerved the deeper I delved into R’s history and personality.

Three estranged sons, time in prison for fire arms, no job, just boxer shorts sitting on a single bed by the television, corresponding with women on craigslist using his iphone. Supposed savings bouy’ed him and with the double-wide paid for, my rent was taking care of his car payment.

He talked about an illegitimate son and how he’d desperately tried to establish his paternity, but the mother refused. R acted clueless about it, but his aloofness towards self-implication drew a portentous picture.

I wondered what R’s father was like. Java Joe loved him and would engage me about Mr. G every time I stopped in, but as a role-play developed between R and I, of me the aloof son and he the controlling father, I wondered if Mr. G was just a wiser version of R.

The smell of marijuana was overpowering. Discarded stems sat in a pile beside a murky bong on the shaky table R kept against his knees. It wasn’t medicinal because the clubs got too expensive, R said. He never mentioned his dealer, or from what I observed, made a pick up.

Boxes were stacked to the ceiling. R said they contained his mother’s estate, as if the whole of it were recently dropped on him, but this clutter had been there for some time. There was no movement. R claimed the reason he didn’t have a job was that he didn’t have his resume as an attachment on his iphone. I suggested he go to the library, but he dismissed it due to the limited amount of time you could spend on a terminal.

It was all very depressing.

R was full of discouragement for me when I ventured out of the house in those initial days. Either the roads were undriveable due to the flurry the night before or the trip was too long.

When I expressed interest in buying a space heater he retorted that if I didn’t shut my door at night I wouldn’t lose so much heat. I felt cornered and without privacy.

Ever since my abduction in Brooklyn I had been habitually drawing escape routes out of wherever I happened to be: workplaces, stairwells, bedrooms, department stores. I also plotted my own death, constantly, and it came everywhere. It was sexually perverse, strung up by my hands in a barn and humiliated.

With no clear escape route through the towers of cardboard boxes and stacked furniture in R’s house, my paranoid state escalated. I considered the windows, blocked by cardboard to keep the cold out, but there was Snow Chief. Let off the chain he would tear me to pieces.

R threw the money order I had given him for rent back at me, saying he wouldn’t pay the fifteen dollars Western Union would charge him to cash it. I offered him the fifteen dollars and he refused, saying it was my problem.

The clerk took his social when R cashed the money order (‘that little fuck’). I realized it was R’s paranoia that inhibited him from returning to the check cashing facility. He was terrified of his personal information leaking out, but why?

After six days he openly described the meth lab that his brother-in-law operated out of the master bathroom before he kicked him out. His brother-in-law is one that textured the walls in my bedroom but never painted them. The texture was gritty and dusty, it’d been a long time.

I offered to cash the money order myself, but R simply squinted his eyes at me. The only option was to return it for a bank check, for which the fee was fifteen dollars and we’d still be in the same boat. I pressed him to open a checking account, but R was diverted when the bank wouldn’t take the tags of his automobile as a form of ID.

I curled up on a roll out futon, lonely and terrified, cocooned in a blanket.

I told R I wanted a lock on my door, just so I could feel more secure, and he said: ‘I don’t care, I’d break it down if I needed to.’

I went to sleep, reggae music making the walls vibrate, and wondered when it would come. Would they ever find my body or would I be wholly injested, just dog shit fertilizing the soggy wintry land, the vibrant moss. My belongings added to the stacks of cardboard boxes and my car a dam in the stream bed.

How would they find me?

Probably the post office. I had given them my physical right…but how long would it be before my parents got nervous, wondered why the hadn’t heard for a while. Things seemed slack on the Rancheria. If I stopped showing up, how long would it be before C tried to track me down?

The non-chalance of my friends and family was maddening. I understood why a person could simply disappear, like a void was astride us all the time. To simply slip away…I returned to that time, meandering aimlessly with Carlo in Brooklyn, flanking me with a swagger defined by his low belt-line, stooping to rub smudges of dirt off his white shoes, the knife palmed in his hand.

I began to realize I lived in that moment, in the same way divine symbolism is perpetually occurring. I’m going back there in writing about it. I become nervous about everyone and every thing. I trust nothing.

This is what PTSD feels like, but I’ll write more about that another day.