Nature's Grave

"Then leave!"-- Trudy Richardson, in our adversarial tone deafness

Just go. This is what everyone except Erik, notorious fuckwit transvestite who could not complete its sex change, tells me here in this insidious section 202 community. Just go, even if I know that I'm fighting biology, fighting lifetime trauma that isn't quite as bad as wartime rape in the Congo, but feels that way, when I add it up. I saw so many dead blacks in North Philadelphia, in Diamond Park, that a graveyard in Liberia would not be much of a disparity: Mr. Morton dead in his doorway, his voodoo like wife letting herself die soon after, a schizophrenic grandmother splitting her granddaughter's face in the lobby, my face red with tears driving chair back to my one bedroom screaming on 911 for the cops, Levora dying from Huntington's, all of this, on top of my own domestic abuse, my own forays into horror shows like Inglis House, and my viewers, such as you are, wonder about my attitude. Riverside is tamer, but no less cruel, biting, cutting, and I have never felt safe here. Instead, poison at letting Presbyterian Homes hurt me so much. When Jerry admonished me not to transfer out my junior year, I had no idea I'd become a combat veteran, fermented into a fungal rot, but this is what I am. 52, dead soul, knowing full well even if I fight an ignorant bitch like Debra Horne off, there are hundreds more where she and Trudy come from, and my strength was tested from an early age. Even if I survive past 60, I will be forced to depend on bad caretakers. 

Even that part of me which held fast, my love of writing, literature-- it too is dying now, because I cannot be like other writers, drug myself into a middle brow smile and do what needs to be done to live. 

Martin Amis talks about the strength of Holocaust victims, the very will they must have had for the sake of testament. Unlike these Jewish Zionists, or future Zionists, I have become a racist, mainly intolerant, burning on the embers of hate I hold in check, not a hate to exterminate so much as remove myself from, but removal to where? I am no longer part of the suburban middle class, exist here as a scourge on black hospitality, though Riverside has a daub of everything, sick Jews who get ostracized, the hated cripples, its corrupt and locally notorious gay couple from whom I need psychic space, now the Korean community on edge with the 30 year old Negro league which forms its core tenants, white trash, like me, and most of those classified according to the disease which landed them in here-- less of a Hispanic contingent.

But I cannot stay now. I've vomited my trauma as a brunt force cry for legal justice, and can't smother the feline in a granny sack, despite the fact that at heart I want nothing, absolutely nothing more to do with public housing, and this cannot be had. Poverty, strength, everything cratering in. I could simply surrender, languish in an institution, and that would be worse than my battle of wills with the lard ass from Mississippi. Does this explain why studio executives keep recycling these bait and switch stories?