So, You Are Dead. Now What?

“Only a matter of weeks had passed since I dyed my hair a cool blue black while on a trip to Florida with a friend I’ll call Mary. It was during this trip, after the hair but before getting sea sickness and falling stone asleep on a tour boat, that Mary’s father raged at us and it changed something in me.”

The year is 1987, I am fifteen years old, it is Autumn and no one is going to help me, much less save me. 

I met Daniel in a parking lot after the mall closed. He was 23 and it sounds like I’m about to tell you a terrible story but this meeting and brief friendship was one of the most wholesome experiences of my life.

Daniel drove a small black, two door car. Maybe it was a Camry. He had a sweet medium sized German Shepherd mix with a cool name that I forget. He did not live in my hometown, he was staying at a Knights Inn nearby the empty lot where I met him.

His car was decorated inside with fake spiderwebs around the dashboard and in the back window. It smelled heavily of Sandalwood. I know that because I asked why it smelled so good and he told me it was incense and I asked, what’s incense? He lit a stick of Sandalwood and tucked the unlit end into where the ashtray clicked into the dashboard. 

My next question, what’s this music? It was The Sisters of Mercy and it was unbearably good. A thin stream of smoke flowed from the incense and a very quick and rare jolt of excitement hit me, like life could have something for me, maybe.

Only a matter of weeks had passed since I dyed my hair a cool blue black while on a trip to Florida with a friend I’ll call Mary. It was during this trip, after the hair but before getting sea sickness and falling stone asleep on a tour boat, that Mary’s father raged at us and it changed something in me. 

Mary’s father was drunk for the entirety of the visit. He drove us around Clearwater just absolutely wasted and dropped us off to enjoy a variety of activities. Getting dropped off was fun for us but the drunk rage driving was scary. My own father used rage driving to terrorize his wife and child, but he wasn’t a drinker and besides that he had been mostly a side note for the last five years of my life.

Mary and I were barely even teenagers. I was fifteen and she was fourteen and I guess we left our things out in the small house her father shared with his second wife and their toddler.

 Mary’s father came home one afternoon to interrupt some basic tranquility we were enjoying and he just unleashed his rage on us. I fled to the guest room, shut the door, and slid my body into the space between the bed and the nightstand. I don’t know how long I was there or how his rage ended. What I did know was how to pretend nothing happened. What raging man? Where? When? I was an expert at that and, honestly, I probably still am. I just don’t test it.

Mary was mad that I left her to clean up after us while her father acted out. She said something snarky and I became smug. We finished the trip but afterward Mary was no longer part of my life because I had shut down completely when it came to her. It wasn’t fair and I carry, still, the guilt of it. As an adult I came to understand that her mother had been a menace, too. I ignored Mary in a way that was unacceptable, however. I wish there had been someone to turn to about the treatment I was getting outside of the house, and inside it, for that matter.

There was not an adult to talk to in my life, or not one who could give me advice. I would never have told my mother about the drunk driving of a raging man because she would have just raged at me herself, but not because she would have been mad at me. The reality of her anger being something she insisted, always, had nothing to do with me though it intersected with literally every moment of my youth effectively severing me from that youth.

Meeting Daniel in an empty parking lot after the mall closed was a crucial encounter. I’m not sure if I said I didn’t want to exist or if I said I wanted to die, I’ll maintain that those are distinctly different experiences but Daniel said something I have never heard anyone else say, ever, but I have lived by it from the moment he spoke it into my spirit. He said: okay, so you’re dead, now you can do anything you want.  

Daniel accepted me as a pen pal for some months. I think I was the one who stopped writing. The letters were never heavy or confessional or even deep, they were just bits of punk news and well wishes. 

One of his letters was written on the back of a big flyer for a music show in New York City by the Circle Jerks, whom I loved. I still have it somewhere, it hung on the wall in my teen basement bedroom until the walls were cleared to make way for the space to be used differently. That flyer helped me realize my need to roam and since I was already dead, I knew that I could.

TL;DR a young man named Daniel handed a strange and beautiful compass to a strange and beautiful girl who was very very lost. She used it to get beyond that part of her path and she still uses it, because it’s the best one.