***First Published in Thuggery & Grace (Issue #5) Ed. Erik Anderson, Richard Froude, & Anne Waldman in Denver, Colorado (2010). Reprinted here with permission.
Excerpt from 1994
By Stacy Elaine Dacheux
In health class, the teacher separates the girls from the boys— then this haggard nurse, this rickety nut job, waltzes into the room.
On the chalkboard, she draws a diagram of what happens inside our bodies—there are tubes that carry eggs around. Every month, the eggs crack, the lining breaks, or whatever, and blood pours out from that place between our thighs.
She says we are going to love the blood, that the blood means life.
I have to get a second opinion. So I read a few books from the 1970s about teenage girls going through “changes.” Inside these books, characters shop for tight jeans, feather their hair, and wear hot clothes. Everyone is pretty excited about being a woman. They chat with their friends while twirling the phone cord around. They can’t wait for the blood.
When the blood finally comes, this one character actually announces it at the breakfast table. Her mom hugs her. Her dad buys flowers. They all congratulate her for being such a great woman, like welcome to the world, welcome to our fucking miserable adult world.
***
I fall asleep on the floor next to my dad’s bed.
I don’t fall asleep like they do in sentimental films where the parent is dying and everyone’s worried sick or acting super poignant about it all.
Instead, my dad and I watch HBO together. Then, my chair gets uncomfortable. So, I drag some cushions in from the living room and throw them on the floor. I lie on the cushions. I listen to the oxygen machine. My dad looks asleep. He is asleep.
Mr. Mom comes on. It’s about a guy who is a mom. He’s not in drag or anything. He’s just playing the part of a mom. He’s home while the lady of the house makes all the cash money. She’s in the boardroom wearing huge shoulder pads. All the businessmen smoke cigarettes. It’s insane.
I’m also knitting. It’s a big square. I don’t know what I will make with the square. I guess that I will just make a bigger square. I put it on my lap. This movie is interesting, but then I’m asleep.
***
In the music video, Eddie Vedder sings like a gurgling maniac from this chair. His eyes are practically ripping out. He might as well be strapped to an electric chair-- that’s the imagery we’re working with.
Then this douche bag kid, who I can only assume is Jeremy, makes his big splash.
Jeremy is mad at his parents because they’re busy being adults. Jeremy is a great artist; so, naturally he goes out into the woods and has a couple retard attacks-- breaking branches and chucking them at the ground. Jeremy dabbles in public speaking, and it’s a prep-school situation there—uniforms and rich people. They all point and laugh. They’re all up in his shit.
Vedder pops in every few seconds to croon. He’s into his song. He’s into his chair.
Meanwhile, Jeremy carries on like a little dummy, fighting with his parents, lighting the woods on fire, and wrapping an American flag around his body—until finally he just walks into the classroom with a loaded gun.
It’s supposed to be artsy. We never actually get to see the shooting— instead, we see slow, almost frozen, images of all the preppy kids looking bloody as hell, like I guess Jeremy killed the fuck out of them.
***
When I roll my dad out of bed, the first thing I do is act casual. I take my right arm and slide it underneath his body, between the spine of his back and the mattress.
I pull his body upright into a sitting position.
I talk about the weather. I flip on the morning news.
I take my left arm and slide it under his legs and push them towards me, until his feet are dangling off the edge of the bed.
I pull and push. I pull and push. I get him situated.
I put on his socks. I feel his feet. They look like a dirty doll’s feet.
I pick out a t-shirt. This one has different red wine stains on it, like that’s the big joke. Under each wine stain it says what type of red it is. My favorite is the “Shiraz” stain. It sounds like some sassy lady. Lady Shiraz. I might name my first child this. I don’t know.
I doubt that I will ever have children. When I tell adults this, they always correct me and say, “No, honey, you will.”
I’m never convinced.
***
In science class, we study Punnett Squares— certain diagrams that show us the various outcomes of breeding one genotype with another genotype. There are recessive traits and dominant traits in each of us.
Punnett Squares are psychotic.
Having sex to share your dominant traits scares me.
In the past, I have only thought about sex in relation to love, as a way to connect your emotional energy to another person’s emotional energy, in order to make double insane energy-- whereas the energy is so intense, it starts thumping out of your bodies simultaneously, and then there are just two bodies jumping, oozing, and flapping around with one another.
***
Just like Pearl Jam, Nirvana wants to sell records. They all want success.
But Kurt Cobain seems different.
He knows being a rock star is self-centered and egotistical. He talks about it all the time—in his music, in interviews. He doesn’t fully understand the ramifications of all this insane teenage love, maybe, at least not at first. So, he is conflicted. He is always conflicted. It’s really hot how conflicted he is—like he really means it.
He’s embarrassed by how much we love him; yet, he also knows how much he needs our love too, and that’s equally as fucked-up embarrassing.
He has no control over how this music pours out of his body—it just rips open his mouth and strums off his hands, like one big painful burst.
***
I tell Dad that I like the “Shiraz” wine stain best, and he stares at me like you fucking dummy. I plop the shirt on over his head. I slide his arms through the sleeves. I pull down the bottom of the shirt. Pretty sharp.
“Hey, what am I some type of dummy?”
He closes his eyes, completely exasperated.
I wrap my arms around his torso, under his armpits, and into a big bear hug. I lift with my legs. We swivel. Then, I let go and he lands on the wheelchair.
He hates it. This chair. It’s stupid. He’s pretty sure.
We’re off and rolling into the kitchen, where I brew up the coffee, crack open some eggs, and flip on some music.
Dad looks out the window as the eggs sizzle. It’s rainy, or it has just rained. Everything is beautifully sad and wet. A raven sits on the branch outside.
“He’s coming for me.”
I want everything to be normal— like boring shit normal. So, I take a spatula and slide it underneath the yolk. It’s firm and rubbery, a bit brown. I flip it over and knock it out.
Dad starts to cry.
“You have no idea what’s going on in my head.”
***
I wish my boobs away. I wish my blood away.
I wish it all away.
I wish only to be forever running around the yard and screaming my fucking face off.
I don’t ever want to love the blood.
I don’t ever want these maybe stupid babies dying inside me all the time.
***
Kurt is right when he sings about us not knowing what it means, all his pretty songs, but we like to sing along, like the joke is on us, like we only understand the beat, or the screaming.
We respond to the sounds more so than the words.
I’m not sure what he is trying to prove by making fun of us in this way, but I’m pretty sure he’s fucked up about it in the same way I’m fucked up about it, and I like that.
***
In the basement, I rummage through Dad’s workspace.
There’s a hat with fake pigeon shit on the rim and “Damn Birds!” sprawled allover it. There’s a bunch of old tapes, a tin can or two of rusty nails, pipe cleaners, and half broken radios. There are piles and piles of unfinished manuscripts for some big book he was writing about The Puritans, his area of expertise. Lots of old books.
I flip through the Guinness Book of World Records. The photo of the world’s tiniest girl looks Colonial and I am jealous. Apparently, she had to wear doll clothes instead of real clothes.
I am looking for a note, like a suicide note, but for cancer patients.
My dad knew he had cancer. He knew it was spreading throughout his brain. Before the surgery, he must have written a note. Something that will give me a clue as to what I should do with my life.
***
I replace my wish of no more blood & boobs with a wish of being the new tiniest girl.
Maybe, instead of growing, tonight in my bed, I will shrink.
I will just get smaller and smaller, until I just disappear.
***
Under the computer keyboard, there’s a piece of notebook paper. I unfold it and see my dad’s handwriting— but it’s a bit off.
The lines are disturbed. The pencil marks are wobbly.
He was clearly working through something before being bedridden, and that working through included how to spell our names, and they are all spelled wrong.
It looks like a 5-year-old child wrote each letter.
Some words trail off. Others don’t make any sense.
***
The magazines and talk shows really have a field day with our generation’s apathy.
Kurt Cobain has become a voice for it.
This angers me because it’s not true—we’re more about caring then they will ever know. We’re more about ripping our hearts out allover the place. We’re more about the blood—wishing it away, yet having to swim around in it regardless, all these lives just cracking and breaking apart. No one knows what to do.
So, we go to shows. We freak the fuck out. We dance in our bedrooms. We turn up the volume. We sing in our cars at the top of our lungs.
We do this because we’re sick of thinking.
We don’t give a shit about words or names or what anything means.
We like the repetition of the melody. The soft repetition and the way Kurt’s voice waves up and down and up and down and up and down, rejecting us and loving us all the same. He needs to hate us in order for us to love him properly.
We understand it. We get it. We’re thankful for it.
***
On New Year’s Eve, my parents used to have friends. They used to have big booze parties. They used to drink out of big goblets.
My father used to do a handstand on the kitchen chair. My mom used to gargle whiskey and spit fire from her mouth.
Their friends used to chant, “Go! Go! Go!”
Their friends used to say, “Cheers!”
Their friends used to kiss in the newness of it all.
For a minute, peering around the doorframe, I used to see it. I wanted to be a part of it.
Now, I don’t give a flying fuck.
My wanting and wishing is unproductive.
I feel it in my body—this ugly oozing body. I feel it in my heart— this pumping heart that pushes oxygen into another kind of blood. This kind of blood is mine. This kind of blood is alive. It’s feeding and moving and flowing, waking something up.
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