Foster Home Burn Out

This latest foster home ranked up there with the worst.  My foster mother was relentlessly neurotic.  She had me cleaning her house to perfection and would always find something wrong with what I did.  She’d curse me out if I didn’t ring out the kitchen sponge after washing the dishes. Then she’d turn to her dogs and talk baby talk with them over how wonderful they were.  She’d say to her dogs, “My little puppy dog would never forget to ring out the sponge…” She was insane.

 

She literally insisted every time I stepped out the door that I was going to be raped.  That murders lurked in every nook, waiting to penetrate my body. She methodically went through every thing I owned, once a week to insure that I wasn’t hiding any cigarettes, letters from boys, liquor or drugs. I had already been orphaned, seen group homes, reformatories and almost a dozen foster families.  I was burnt out.  I was 15 years old.  I needed those cigarettes.

 

I had a job at a flower shop.  Despite the fact that I was barely old enough to work, I loved working as many hours as possible because it was a legit excuse to get out of that house.  I was making money and was able to buy myself some clothes, my cigarettes (which I hid in my locker at school) and make up.

 

One Saturday I finally snapped and quietly decided my time there was done. Before I was to leave for work I pack a bag with a few items.  I had an extra change of clothes and that was about all.  I knew I couldn’t leave the house with too much stuff or my foster family would notice.  I called in sick to work and figured the 8 hours that I was suppose to be at work would give me a head start on the cops and foster family’s chance of finding me.  But without a lot of thought I didn’t have a place to go. 

 

I had no plan, but I was an experienced runner.  I knew I couldn’t go to my good friends because that that would be the first place they would look.  I couldn’t even tell my good friends what was up because my runaway experiences in the past proved that good friends always crack under pressure.  Eventually somebody asks them too many questions and they give in.  They always give you up to the cops or parents. 

 

I went downtown to the record store where I knew some of the guys working there.  I hung around just trying to make small talk.  One of the guys, Kip, was sort of heavy metal burn out type who was in a band with my good friends.  I knew he was fond of me because I was a not a typical girl.  I was not a preppy 80’s girl.  I was a bad mix of new wave and punk rock.  I was stealing most of my clothes out of the theater department’s costume room.  I wore the vintage dresses and band uniforms I found there.

 

So I hung around for quiet sometime before I finally told him I was on the run and had no place to go.  No plans.  I felt fine right there, then, but this was winter in Minnesota and I knew it was going to be a long cold night.  He had concern but I could tell he really didn’t want to be involved with a young runaway.  He did tell me that if I waited until after midnight or so he would leave his car open and I could sleep in it.  But he said I had to sleep on the floor so that no one could see me.

 

Cool. This was my plan.  Now to find a way to spend the rest of the day out of sight.  I started to think about my sister in Minneapolis and how if I could reach her I bet she would take me in.  She was 19 and had her own apartment.  But I was in Steele County, about 200 miles away.  I developed the long-term plan of hiding out for a few days until the smoke cleared and then talking to one of my friends about driving me to Minneapolis.

 

It was at this point that some boys from school came into the record shop.  They were rich boys, just fucking their Saturday away.  They invited me to come with them to a party.  It was out in the country somewhere.  They said everyone from school would be there.  So I went with them.  We hung out all day, drove around and after the sun set we drove out to this keg party. 

 

I had never really drank much.  I had never experienced the type of intoxication that comes with bottomless kegs of beer.  But I knew I had hours to kill before I could slip into Kip’s car to sleep.  So I’m drinking beer, talking, they had a band playing in this sort of machine shed of a building we were all in. There were a few hundred people there.  I kept my mouth shut about the fact that I was on the run but secretly hoped that someone would see it in my eyes or something.  I secretly hoped that someone would take me home with them.  Don’t get me wrong, I was very much still a virgin.  I was as tough and bad on the outside as a 4’11 teenage girl could be, these were just naive thoughts.

 

I had drunk about two beers and was drunk.  With all the people at this party you might think they would have more than one Port-O-Potty, but no. We all took our turns waiting in line.  As I waited in this line the guy behind me, out of nowhere and with no warning, pukes over his shoulder and directly onto me.  He showers the entire right side of me from my shoulder to my ankle.   It was beer and red spaghetti puke.  I was mortified. 

 

I pushed my way to the front of the line and people just made way for me with looks of absolute disgust.  I slipped into the Pot-O-Potty and began to undress.  I was crying in my  drunken fog.  The bathroom was covered in beer piss and dirt from the machine shed’s floor.  I teetered on one foot trying to get out of my pants.  Almost immediately people outside the door were starting to get impatient. Perhaps they thought I had puked on myself? They were banging on the door.  I was loosing it.  More tears.

 

I shook the vomit cover clothes out a little to release the strings of pasta. I rolled them into a tight ball, keeping the clean side out so that I would not get puke inside my bag.  I put on my one change of clean clothes, cleaned up my eye make up. I walked out of that toilet with my head up as though nothing had happened. I darted to the other side of the party with hopes that I could die.  Or maybe find people who did not see my horrific embarrassment.  Or maybe I would see someone I knew to hang around with. And get a beer.

 

Success was mine.  I got a beer.  I found a cluster of girls that I knew from school.  I had lost the boys and was a bit concerned about how I would get back into to town and to Kip’s house.  But the girls had offered to take me “home.” 

 

The car was packed.  I was stuck in the back seat with this one girl and her boy friend as they made out with a fever. Their zippers down.  I was blushing.  Someone up front was complaining that they smelt puke but no one knew it was me.  I had them drop me off at Kip’s.  They thought it was my house. 

 

It was absolutely freezing outside.  I got into Kip’s car and found a thin blanket stuffed between the two front bucket seats.  I curled up on the floor and let the beer I had drank put me to sleep.  Day broke a few hours later and I awoke to find that I was not in Kip’s car after all.  In my drunkenness I had crawled into his parents car!  My heart dropped because I could hear people inside his house.  The car was parked just outside the kitchen window.

 

I slipped out the opposite side door and down the street.  I had nowhere to go.  I walked for miles.  I had a bag full of puke. It was cold.  I was hung over and tired.  I smoked cigarettes to give me the illusion that there was heat somewhere.

 

I never did go back to that foster home.  I did find my sister but it took another year or so.  My friends did buckle and give me up to the authorities.  By the time the got me I was so sick from the elements and so pathetic that they all took pity on me. 

cold as ice cream, but still as sweet

1.

Certain kinds of people ride the bus – it’s trash America; poor single moms with three squealing kids, their hair uncombed, off to visit their family in Ohio. Old people with packed sandwiches – dropping their teeth when they fall asleep, a few afraid-to-fly uptight types and of course there’s always some runaways and drifters of several varieties. There is no glamour on a Greyhound.

 

You take your seat and watch the people board the bus, clinging on to their purses and food. You size them up while they’re busy finding their seats. You hope that if one of the plops down next to you they don’t stink or talk. Nothing worse than being forced to listen to some one you don’t want to know blabber on about shit that don’t matter.

 

The air is stale as it’s forced through the vents. It’s moving but devoid of oxygen. You can smell the blue sanitary toilets. You sit with a strained neck as you stare through a tinted window. The world looks just as gray and bland as the upholstery your ass is sitting on.

 

If you were wondering what kind of rider I was, I would classify as a drifter I guess. I used to be a runaway but at the age of 19 I felt like I had graduated on to be a drifter.

 

I had taken this ride to New York City from Minneapolis once before. I had hopped the bus on the fly and took off to New York City just to hang out with some friends in a punk band. I had to go back to Minneapolis when my kidneys failed after consuming nothing but beer for weeks on end.

 

The month or so that I was in New York I had been squatting in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side. We all use to live like animals and pee in pickle jars because we had no plumbing. It was disgusting. To this day I still can’t look at a big jar of deli pickles. All I see are pickles floating in pee.

 

No matter what kind of sickening situation I find myself in, it’s always about hygiene. I am obsessed with hygiene. I’d spend my last three dollars at the laundromat and shower in the cold spray of an open fire hydrant when I had to. And believe me, there were many times when I had to.

 

So anyway, while I was squatting there we all drank a lot of beer. It was the punk rock way of living. I was damned close to comatose by the time I made it to the Beth Israel Hospital. I stayed for about ten days before I popped the IV out of my vein and cashed in my round trip bus ticket for home.

 

But this trip was different. This was my fresh start. I was leaving the street gang bullshit of Minneapolis behind me. All my friends were going to jail, or the military or dieing. Literally. I was boxed in back home, unable to shake the street fights, my bad reputation and all the shit that went with it. It’s not that I had better things in mind for myself, I just knew that way of living was a dead end. I set out alone. I had gotten myself a job in New York City. I had $90 in my pocket and carried everything I owned in an army green backpack. I was nineteen, tough as nails and nothing was gonna stop me. Nothing did stop me. I’m here telling the story now, ain’t I?

 

I wasn’t a punk. I was a skinhead girl and a proper one at that. You see skinheads, the true skins, have very set ways of doing things. My life as a skinhead had nothing to do with the race relations or white supremacy that people today associate with the skinhead subculture. We just drank lots of beer, got in fists fights over nothing, listened to good music and looked good doing it. After Oprah aired that first piece about Nazi skinheads and Geraldo Rivera got his nose busted by a rowdy skinhead wielding a folding chair things changed drastically for us. It sounds funny but it’s true. Prior to that no one in America really knew what a skinhead was and no one cared. We went from being discarded youth to being hated celebrities overnight.

 

So there I was, a proper skinhead girl. My pants were tapered perfectly to meet the top of my shined Doc Martin boots. My plaid skirts were cut high to show lots of fishnet covered thigh. I wore the required Fred Perry brand shirts with my braces (thin suspenders) up. Some of skins wore the Ben Sherman shirts but they were nearly impossible to come by in Minneapolis because they are imported from the UK. It’s not like I could afford them anyway.

 

My hair was in the “fringe cut,” meaning shaved short on the top with longer wisps circling my hairline. I thought this cut made me look feminine compared to my punk rock comrades sporting their Mohawks, soaped spikes and shaved heads. I was just a streetwise tomboy, what did I know about feminine?

 

The bus took me through Wisconsin and down through Chicago. We hit Cincinnati in the middle of the night. I had to transfer buses there when the drivers changed shifts. This was a good chance to get some food and wash my face. Well sort of. The cafeteria-style restaurant was closed so I got some chips from the vending machine. I tried not to drink anything because it would just mean having to dangle my ass over the bus toilet while we zoomed down the highway. And there really was no way to wash your hands in those bus bathrooms.

 

So I was washing my face in the station’s bathroom sink and when some lady gets her bag lifted. I don’t know what’s wrong with these people, leaving their bags outside the stall while they pee? That woman wailed and cried, but there was nothing anybody could do. The shit was gone.

 

In these situations us cold-hearted types blame the victim just for being there. The truth is you’d see crime after crime in a bus station if you hang out for a while. The EKG of the bus station has a staggered heart beat which piques at times when people are ripped off, or hearts are broken, or when the vending machines takes somebody’s change. There’s a ruckus for a moment, somebody’s screaming, yelling and crying. Everybody else tries to ignore it. Just drag your luggage with the broken handle from one roped off line to the next, board the bus and it’s all gone. If you are smart, you just try to exist between those blips.

 

To be honest I enjoyed the action because it made the time pass faster and plus I felt relatively safe. Nobody bothered me. I may have looked young, but I felt like my tattoos made me look seasoned. Keep in mind that society has changed it’s view on tattoos since I scratched these marks in my skin. I wasn’t sporting the fashionable works of art that we see gracing people’s skin today. My tattoos were done by a cranked up biker in the middle of drunkin’ skinhead parties. Each tattoo cost as much as he needed to score that day. He learned his art in prison and still used a homemade tattoo gun like the one he fashioned in his cell, made out of walkman motor and a ball point pen casing.

 

Things are different today. Many of today’s tattooists are well-paid art students. And people with money get tattoos to look pretty or to look like their favorite VJ on MTV. I got them to ugly myself up. So I was harder on the surface. You know, like armor. People looked at my skin and knew only a crazy person would do what I had done. Mothers would grab their children and cross the street. It worked.

 

And I was packing, sort of. I had a set of brass knuckles. I had one brass piece for each hand. One in each pocket of my bomber jacket so I could slip ‘em on just by tucking my hands inside my pockets. I only had to use ‘em a few times, but they were always my security blanket. You got to lookout for yourself.

 

After twenty-eight hours I stepped off that bus into the center of 42^nd Street’s Port Authority Bus Station. Out of that sick, sour air and into the stinky, steamy August air of New York City. I was aching for a shower and looking at Port Authority did not make the situation any better.

 

This was 1989 and 42^nd Street was filth. Port Authority was the congregation place of homeless people, hustlers, peepshow customers, and drug addicts–I felt right at home. It had all the seedy parts of life that make me feel so comfortable. For example, there is something about a homeless man laying on a square of cardboard, soaking in his own piss that is so honest to me. As people pass him without so much as a glance he’ll shout out “You fuck face!” You know he’s just lying there is his own worthlessness and speaking his mind.  He’s got nothing to hide.

 

Compared to the regular guys I had encountered in my lifetime—the guys in suits who gave me jobs, handled my social services files, the guys who lied through their teeth, stole money, and hit on me even if they were married with kids–this homeless man just felt so much safer to me. These street people wear their ugly parts on the outside and I appreciate them for it. You know exactly what you’re dealing with.

 

I carried this bag that weighed almost as much as I did through the bus station until I found a subway map. Cabs were not an option. Ninety dollars can last about five minutes in NYC if you’re not careful and I knew that. I was going to go directly to my new job; let them know that I arrived and I wanted to be put on their schedule immediately. I would work that day if they would let me.

 

The trains were easy enough to figure out. I used the same plan that my sister had taught me when she showed me how the buses ran their routes in Minneapolis. If you get on the wrong train you just hop off and go the opposite direction; there are only so many mistakes a person can make.

 

I took the 1/9 line uptown to 110^th Street. Climbing the steps out of the train station I found myself in the Columbia University area, a totally different world. It’s a richer area where the garbage is swept off the streets and the people stroll around with baby carriages. Baby carriages that carry actual babies and not cans to be recycled or broken televisions. I walked the couple of blocks to the address I had written down and found it: Kinko’s Copy Center.

 

It was smaller but otherwise exactly that same as the store in Minneapolis, where I had worked for more than a year. It was a good job. I had health insurance and could see a gynecologist when I needed to, see a dentist to get my teeth cleaned regularly. I liked the people I was working with and I was always learning something new. I liked the machines too.

 

I very quickly learned how to fix every machine in the joint. I could fix anything, whether it was a fax machine, a folding machine, whatever. I could fix a copy machine with a nickel, Scotch tape and a paper clip.

 

Of course, this was before the big duplicators were so electronic. Today the copy machines have sensors, they detect where the paper is jammed and then a particular light goes off. It’s automatic. Back then the machines would not do diagnostics on themselves. They would simply stop with the sound of scrunching paper and you would have to open them up and figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. They ran with a lot of cogs, pins and rollers.

 

Anyway it was a job that was very easy for me, and my strong work ethic made them appreciate me so I did well.

 

I went to the cashier and asked for Mike. He was the manager I had spoken with on the phone. He came to the counter and introduced himself. Later he told me that my tattoos had startled him. I had a lot of tattoos; by this point I had even tattooed my head, which was exposed by my short-cropped hair. And a day before I left Minneapolis I had a friend rather crudely scratch a spider web tattoo into my right elbow with a home-made gun. Like I said, a lot of tattoos. As I shook Mike’s hand he shook hard enough to break the new tattoo open again. The fucking thing stayed raw like that for weeks. Every time I bent my elbow the scabs would open up.

 

Mike was prepared to receive some sweet girl from the Midwest and in walked this tattooed street punk. He hired me anyway. I wanted to start right then and there. He put me on the schedule starting two days from then. I took what I could get.

 

Before I left I used the Kinko’s bathroom to wash up a little. I washed my face and privates. The key to washing up in a public restroom is not touching anything. You try not to let your feet touch the floor or your hands touch the sink. You teeter on one foot and slip into your socks. You hover over the sink and only touch the stream of water. It’s a balancing act.

 

I washed that elbow tattoo—there were always bits of lint and stuff stuck in the scabs—and covered it with a coat of Bacitracin ointment. I changed my panties, socks and shirt. I rolled my dirty clothes up in a tight ball and pushed them down inside the bag. Oh how I longed for a shower. I wanted to wash my hair, but didn’t want to step out of the bathroom with wet hair. I didn’t want people at Kinko’s to think I was homeless.

 

I stuck my mouth under the faucet, drank some water and put on a fresh coat of powder and eye make up. I put on my jacket, despite the heat, so no one would see that I had changed my shirt and left. Looking back, I may have been down and out and a little reckless, but I guess I had a lot of pride.

 

I stepped out the door of Kinko’s and into the heat of midday. I was feeling a little fresher, but my bag was feeling heavy. My head was feeling heavy. This seemed a little strange to me. I was thinking how I had been sitting on that bus forever. You’d think I’d be rested, but instead I felt tired. (I did not understand that traveling itself could make one tired.)

 

I took my big bag of worldly possessions, all my most valuable stuff, across the street to a bench. I sat down, pulled the bag in close to me and set my head down on it. I could have fallen asleep right there. But I didn’t, I had to plot my next step.

 

© Ducky DooLittle 2006