To understand my own horrible sins and the Hell to which I was cast down into. it is necessary to relay the stories of certain others. I must emphatically however make clear to the reader that I was condemned to a living Hell (and very likely am Damned to a metaphysical Hell, when I leave this world) by virtue of a depravity that is mine and of mine own alone. Nobody else bears any responsibility for the circumstances of my life and for the conditions in which I found myself (both in the place of my own mind and the streets where I lived, remained enslaved to my addiction, was preyed upon - and was other times a predator and upon the cold, utterly unforgiving surfaces upon which I laid my head, spilled my blood and upon which I endlessly walked. I never stopped walking. To stop walking would have killed me. As I stated, my addiction - my terrible contempt for God and man that brought me to the deeper recesses of Hell owe entirely to my own depravity and weakness. Yet it must e acknolwedge that the people we are most close to - friends and enemies, parents and siblings, paramours and mentors, rivals and confidants always play a role in any man’s fortunes. I am proffering my confession. My confession cannot be complete were I to neglect introducing the reader to Betty Jean Totten.
Betty Jean’s Story
My Mother was exceptionally beautiful - in a way that was unseemly. There was a sinister aspect to how effortlessly she could (and did) captivate the attention - and not infrequently - the passions of others. When Betty Jean - my Mother - left me I was 13 years old. And I was devastated. I was madly in love with my Mother - not in any incestuous way (psychically - rather, from my earliest memories I felt a desperate, imminent loss when I was in her company - no matter how much affection in those fledging moments that she availed me to, as I knew that she would within days or weeks (sometimes hours) be gone from my life once again.
Not infrequently she would board a plane to Los Angeles, incident to larks and frolics - sometimes undertaken in states of apparent fugue - and I’d be left wondering as a small boy if I were ever to look upon her, feel her embrace, smell her wonderful fragrant hair or hear the sing-song lilt in her voice (a subtle egacy of her roots in old Los Angeles). Even when my Mother was physically present, she’d regularly be overtaken by a true blackness of mood that transcended mere depression. There was merely nothing for her to give - of mind, of spirit, of body. There were times as a small boy when I was frightened of her when these states would emerge. My erstwhile Father was overseas half of the year, doing whatver was required to afford us a comfortable style of living. And there were many occasions when I feared my Mother would murder me and then herself.
When I was not actively afraid of my Mother, there were many more times when it appeared as if her being - her ‘‘soul’’ if the reader will forgive such a cliche’d descriptor had ‘left’. I’d find myself alone with a ghostly vessel of what had been a stunningly beautiful woman - reduced for reasons I did not understand - to a pale and ghostly husk. A phantasm. As a young boy I found myself mourning the loss of my Mother over and over again - hoping desperately that she would return, but knowing, when I’d allow myself to take honest account of the situation, that my Mother was never going to truly come back.
Betty Jean Becomes a Murderess
May, 1990 - my Mother had re-emerged in my life but had in tow a man she had apparently married on something of a whim. He was addicted to alcohol to a degree I have never witnessed, before or since. It was incredible to me that he could consume the sheer volume of 80 and 100 proof spirits that he did and remain lucid and essentially functional. He coveted my Mother’s (not insubstantial) wealth and great physical beauty (which she had very much retained even in her mid 40s. He would beat her quite regularly owing to a vicious and horrifically primitive nature and fact that (as I discerned even as a young adolescent) he was terrified of losing her but also was beside himself on grounds he could never actually, truly ‘‘have’’ her anymore than I myself could. My Mother’s late, second husband was as devastated by my Mother’s arbitrary coldness and hardness of heart as I was - as was everybody seduced by her magnetism.
One night, in St Charles Illinois - a strange, rural town with ambitions to Bohemian quaintness where my Mother and her Husband had moved (and I had moved along with them, being I was not yet fifteen years old and (humiliated as I am to acknowledge this even decades subsequent, I remained totally infatuated wth my beautiful and increasingly spiritually hollowed Mother. That night it was very very hot. My Mother’s husband was beating her very severely. So I ran. There was a hilltop clearing several miles down from the main road of the subdivision in which I lived.
I had to gain control of myself on grounds that as I ran, I realized I was inadvertently weeping, in spite of myself. I forced myself to become composed - early adolescence when when I learned to make a friend of pain. To shape it into a controlled fury, to embrace its tortuous discomfort to punish myself for my own weaknesses, to disconnect it all together so as to live as a Man - and a man of the master caste at that. I disconnected the shameful emotions that were consuming me at that moment and I did not cry again for twenty years. I never returned to the clearing in the woods either. It was my way of leaving childish things behind in childhood. I walked all night to a highway service station payphone and I called my Father. That night in 1991, My Father saved my life. A few days later, I was with him in Japan.
How did Betty Jean the victim - the shell of a woman of otherworldly, savage and sanguinary beauty - became (in my opinion) a murderess? How did she finally manage to destroy herself and how did I allow myself to be destroyed by her terrible Fate? I will relay the answers to these things if and when I develop the emotional fortitude to tell the tale. Recounting these events is devastating to me. I would never drean of doing so were it not essential to understand my descent into the abject horror and living death of heroin addiction. I can assure the reader I derive nothing but pain - almost intolerable pain - from writing of these occurrences. God be with you and protect you - as He has protected me.
CHICAGO TYPEWRITER 1/5/2022
Thomas, I've been reading your stuff for years and been a sub forever. This stuff is hard to read so I can only imagine how hard it is to write. This isn't some modern, pussified statement of solidarity. I respect this. Good on you, and God's love on you and yours.
Been free of the junk for around twenty years now. Was a fucking bumpy route out of there too, via booze, coke, pills, benzos, detonated relationships, intensive care units, life support machines and wild, hungry madness. Your words have real power and resonate deeply with me. Really moved me did that. Absolute fucking respect.