All Parties in Hell
Short memoir about a teenager struggling to fit in after her father's suicide.
Published by Variant Literature, Journal Issue #5
“You look like shit,” Carrie threw out bluntly as I rushed into eighth-grade homeroom right before the tardy bell rang. The devil on my shoulder agreed with her, but Carrie wasn’t supposed to sit on the same side as my low self-esteem.
“I didn’t have time to put makeup on this morning,” I snapped back, “but tha...” Mrs. Jones cut me off with roll call and I turned forward abruptly in my desk.
“Thanks for that,” I finished my thought soundlessly.
The rest of my morning was spent mentally absorbed in the question of why my so-called best friend felt she had the right to tell me I looked like shit. I would never have said the same to her, at least not out loud anyway, but a little makeup would definitely have improved her pallid complexion. By lunch I was exhausted from the effort of lobbing silent insults. Also, I had the sneaking suspicion Carrie had intentionally pissed me off in order to deflect an otherwise uncomfortable discussion.
I had gotten back from my father’s funeral the day before, but the devil on his shoulder had not been buried with him. I had brought it home with me to lurk in the shadows and scare off theoretical conversation.
Suicide was a devil too uncomfortable to confront. An extreme level of unease was written all over the back of classmates’ heads as they quickly turned away, just as discomfiture was embedded in the weak, sympathetic smiles that teachers offered to me from the front of their classrooms.
“He made a choice,” their muteness told me. “Now put some makeup on and get over it.”
My dad had already been absent from my life for eight years, but not by choice.
Not long ago I had told Carrie my dreams of turning eighteen and finding him again so he and I could laugh and cry and walk down the aisle of my someday-wedding together. Carrie had hurried the discourse along; she didn’t like to be uncomfortable.
Carrie never spoke of her own father. She put valiant effort into tuning out the bad in the world, and I allowed her the tactic out of gratitude for her willingness to stand by my side. She had been the only person to acknowledge me the first day of eighth grade, although I couldn’t really blame the other students for not. I had shown up looking like a middle-aged saleswoman in my mother’s animal print, hand-me-downs and a frizzy perm, free from the local beauty school two days before my eleventh new school since kindergarten. I didn’t like curly hair, and I didn’t want a perm, but free was free was free, and my mother never turned down free. The crispy results were so horrid my mother decided I would have to get my “fried” hair cut off at another beauty school two weeks later. As I sat in the chair watching the clippers outline the shape of my head, I unsuccessfully fought back tears in anticipation of the names I would be called the next day. Carrie had continued to walk the halls by my side.
Last week, I explained to Carrie that my father was dead, and all my dreams of reunions along with him. I had been careful not to shed tears; I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She listened distractedly, and then changed the topic immediately. She felt the one-sided dialogue should have been enough, and our lives should continue as they always had. We should talk about boys, music, and forging notes to get out of PE, just like before. I should simply get over it, or at least have the decency to pretend I had so as not to make everyone uncomfortable.
When school let out for the summer, I took my aunt up on an invitation she had extended at the funeral and went to Atlanta to stay with her and my cousin. It was my first taste of freedom. At home with my mother, I lived a life of little choice. As she dropped me off at the Greyhound station with a purple duffel bag of clothes I hadn’t been allowed to pick out on my own, my mother told me I was making her uncomfortable by “choosing” my dad’s side of the family. She was “disappointed” that I didn’t appreciate the sacrifices she had made for me.
Despite the time and distance between us, Aunt Nadine and Karen were immediately my closest family, and their larger-than life personalities made them the two coolest people I’d ever met. Their apartment was in a mid-sized, gated complex, but I loved how stylishly big-city it felt compared to my own small-town existence. Instead of competing with the white walls that make most apartment dwellers uncomfortable, Aunt Nadine embraced the color with an overstuffed, white living room suite. It was sophisticated furniture you could sink into, with glamorous, red throw pillows you could balance your plate of pizza on. Even the small balcony was fashionable with two short, red director’s chairs where my aunt would go to smoke her cigarettes after work. By mid-summer Karen and I were smoking cigarettes out there too. Aunt Nadine had insisted after she’d caught us hanging out of Karen’s third-story, bedroom window late one night. She decided that smoking was not a crime worth risking our lives over.
Nothing made my dad’s youngest sister uncomfortable. She was open and honest, telling me both the good and not-so-good stories about my dad, and reassuring me that he loved me so wholeheartedly that it made her jealous. Aunt Nadine asked me questions about my life, and indulged my theories about what the lyrics to REM’s “Losing My Religion” actually meant. I was in awe of her.
My cousin Karen, just two years my senior, was a blast of excitement in the blandness of my existence. Life was filled with music every moment we were awake; one corner of her room was devoted entirely to a CD tower and a stereo. And, although the space she carved out for herself wasn’t quite as urban-chic as Aunt Nadine’s, it was entirely hers. Karen’s bedroom floor was made of clothes, her bathroom amassed beauty products, and her car exploded laundry, hair scrunchies, and myriad more CD’s whenever the doors were opened.
Karen was kind and free-spirited and fantastically amazing, my long-lost sister and my partner-in-crime. She could pass for eighteen at a couple of stores that were too negligent to card, and we stockpiled cigarettes for languid tube rides down the river.
“I’ve got towels,” Karen said, Pearl Jam’s “Alive” radiating from the speakers, “just pull some out of the trunk.” They were still wet from the last use.
A liquor store once sold her a bottle of low-end wine, but that was a fluke. At any rate, we discovered that weed was easier to get our hands on than alcohol, and cheaper too. She had a part-time, minimum wage job as a hostess at Applebee’s, and I had a few twenty dollar bills that well-intentioned relatives had slipped to me after the funeral. We saved money on snacks by making the rounds at the local grocery stores for free samples whenever we had the munchies. I don’t know how we didn’t wind up in jail, or even dead, considering Karen’s propensity for cutting across six lanes of interstate traffic, joint in hand and music cranked up, to make a last minute exit. It wouldn’t have mattered to me; I had never before felt so alive, or so completely unafraid of death.
I counted down those disappearing days with silent resignation, aware it was all just a brief diversion from the uncomfortableness of my “real” life. I knew that someone like Karen would never have been friends with someone as geeky and unfashionable as me if we hadn’t been related. Society would never have allowed it; she was beautiful and popular, and I was not.
By the time I entered high school as a freshman that fall, I had metamorphosed from the prior year’s nerd, whose biggest crime was ditching gym, to a rebel with a sense of self for the first time in my life, although still not beautiful nor popular. I found I could fit in with the parking-lot-smokers in their concert-Tees by wearing ripped jeans and black T-shirts and proclaiming my love of Metallica. My mom found the thrift-store-look cheap enough to support and didn’t care when my eye liner got darker and wider. I was goth before “Goth” had a name.
Happy to still live in the same school district for a second year, I rode the bus home to an empty house and spent my afternoons talking on the phone with Carrie, who had begun to wear makeup that year. Carrie’s stepdad didn’t let her give out their phone number or tie-up the phone line when he was there, but he worked until five and we talked until then. The black-and-white TV with rabbit ears did little to distract me from my solitude after we hung up the phone.
One weekend I asked my mother for music. She purchased a single cassette of my choice. Carrie gave me two additional tapes from her own hard-earned collection, and I borrowed my mother’s boombox to play them on. Accordingly, my evenings were full of homework, phone gossip, and hair bands, over and over and over again. Poison, Skid Row and Guns N’ Roses would have prompted noise complaints from the neighbors, had there been any neighbors close enough to hear.
My mother briefly worked the best job she’d had in years, evening shift at KFC. She got health insurance and any leftovers that were sitting under the fluorescent lights at closing. I ate biscuits for breakfast and cold fried chicken for dinner almost every day, and I loved it. Boredom abounded, but it could have been worse; my mother could have been there too, obsessively scrubbing the floors of our rented country house that had no furniture except two beds on the floor.
My mother often imagined I had wronged her in some way, but rarely deigned it necessary to tell me how, probably because of my sullen attitude and insistence that her reasoning was both trivial and ludicrous. I wanted to be my own person, to hang out in the movie theater parking lot with my friends. She wanted me to snap glamour shots of her for the pervert at the realty company who promised her a job with better hours and pay “as soon as a position opened up.”
She begged me to call her “Mama,” a southern term of endearment that she also considered a sign of respect. I countered that it was childishly beneath my fifteen years and insisted on “Mom.” I begged her to act “normal” and quit embarrassing me by dating all the cops in town. She countered that she didn’t take advice from bratty teenagers and also needed a life of her own. Our uncomfortable conversations ended with my mother pretending I had ceased to exist.
When she changed jobs once again, her shifts at the convenience store brought her home less often than the fast food restaurant had. She considered it a perk of the job; it was easier to avoid me that way. She could go weeks on end without a single word uttered in my direction, and I learned to take advantage of her silence. If my requests to leave the house with anyone willing to drive the long, country-mile to pick me up were ignored, I considered it a “yes” and went regardless.
During one of these numerous weeks of silence, as the school day was coming to an end, an office messenger let me know that my mom would be picking me up. I rolled my eyes in response. When the bell rang I gathered my belongings and went out to my mother’s waiting car. She didn’t speak. I didn’t speak.
Pedestrians, unaware of my mother’s lack of spatial awareness behind the wheel, barely escaped with their lives as she pulled out of the parking lot and sped through the school zone. No matter; she knew the police intimately. We took the long way through town in the opposite direction of our humble abode and halted jerkily at every traffic light that had the nerve to change unexpectedly in her path. I breathed a sigh of relief when we finally turned southbound onto the stoplight-free interstate. My mother’s nerves also calmed and, as she turned the radio on to celebrate our safety, Dr. Dobson’s voice filled the air. Mom listened to Christian broadcasting exclusively, and we’d heard this particular prerecorded program a dozen times before.
The words bounced around my head on repeat as we continued past the Montgomery exits, much to my dismay. The only reason to go further would be to visit my grandparents, who lived in so rural a destination that it made our own neck of the woods seem like a suburb. Directions to their residence included references to multiple barns and a single flashing light, and we’d never made the hour and a half trek on a school night before. Perhaps my mother had lost her job and was going to borrow money from her unsuspecting folks.
It was unfortunate that she hadn’t let me go home and change clothes first, considering my typical school outfit was bound to make them uncomfortable. In addition to my normal ripped jeans and black T-shirt, I also wore a black suede jacket, matching boots, several layered, gold-plated necklaces and two pairs of long, dangling earrings in each ear after piercing a second hole in my ears myself with a safety pin. My mother had thoughtfully purchased the jacket from Wal-Mart as a birthday present and, when Christmas came along, she had gotten the black suede boots to complete the ensemble. Thanks to my somber attire, jet-black-from-a-bottle hair and sarcastic attitude, I was quite happy to have convinced a niche group of headbangers that I was one of them, but my grandparents didn’t need to know that.
Focus on the Family had replaced Family Talk as we neared the exit to my grandparents. I sighed to myself. My grandfather’s goats wouldn’t care what I was wearing, and it would be nice to eat a meal that wasn’t straight from the can, which was the way we typically ate now that there were no fast food leftovers.
She drove past their exit. It was probable she’d missed it unintentionally and would take the next one.
But she didn’t. And she still didn’t speak as we continued south another thirty miles before exiting beside a Stuckey’s into a nondescript town of azalea-covered, cookie-cutter homes. My mother searched her pockets while driving haphazardly with her knees until a red light suddenly objected. Stopped half a car length into the intersection, she dug out a paper scrap with scrawled directions and proceeded to make a U-turn despite a prohibitive sign. Ten minutes and several miles later we pulled into the crowded parking lot of one of the many megachurches that had ostentatiously sprung up, seemingly overnight, all along the Bible Belt.
The crowd made no sense on a Tuesday night until I spotted the banner announcing a “Teen Revival!” Oh joy. Just in case the airwaves hadn’t belabored the point that today’s youth were all headed to hell in a handbasket, I was about to be treated to more preaching. The religious assembly would no doubt be more uncomfortable with my black eye makeup and matching nail polish than my grandparents would have been.
“No thanks. I’ll wait in the car,” is what I would have said if I had thought for one second there was any chance of getting away with it. But it wouldn’t have work. I’d done battle with Mom before, and she’d won every time. I surmised that my mother would have sent the entire congregation out to compel me in, all without a single word from her in my direction. So, as she exited the vehicle, I trudged uncomfortably along behind, hoping to keep my head down and avoid eye contact entirely.
As was par for the course, we were late. The octagon-shaped sanctuary was already filled to capacity around a pulpit situated directly in the center, stage-like. The second floor balcony was packed full of adolescents most of whom, I assumed, were lacking the means of transportation to take themselves anywhere else but there. Meanwhile the first floor was brimming with parents, grandparents, and church elders who had come out in support of teenage reform. There, on the main level amongst the diversity-deficient worshipers, I found myself uncomfortably awaiting judgement. Watchful eyes delivered it quickly as we crowded into an already full pew.
The preacher’s opening prayer launched immediately into a denouncement of the music teenagers listened to “these days.” It was the root of all evil. As proof of his theory he played tidbits of songs, all of which contained uncomfortable, thinly-veiled references to sex; because, as rock-and-rollers of every generation know, sex sells. My mother had never been a rock-and-roller, and it was at this point she threw her hands in the air and wailed. Mom had a natural ability to cry on cue; although, the outburst could have been from the uncomfortable realization that she had unwittingly purchased one of these albums for me herself.
Other sainted adults, so as not to leave my mother alone in her discomfort, also threw their hands in the air with loud shouts of “Amen!,” “Hallelujah!,” and “Praise the Lord!,” whilst the preacher seized upon this opportunity to beseech the youth of the congregation to give up the devil’s music.
“Lay your burden down at the altar of Christ!” he called out.
Teenagers responded in droves, like the good sheep they were called to be, descending from the balcony to place tapes and CDs at the preacher’s feet so he could joyously stomp them to pieces. I was uncomfortable at the waste of good money, having only the three cassettes myself. I was also rather perplexed. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out whyanyone would show up at church with Bon Jovi or Def Leppard in their pockets. The longer I pondered that detail, the more convinced I became that I was watching a rehearsed performance. Typical of my mother to drag me to a free show. Perhaps there would be dinner afterward; she loved a good potluck, uncomfortable as it was to show up empty-handed.
A snippet from Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” stopped, and the energy in the room began to lag uncomfortably. The preacher wound down his own excitement with an alter call.
“Come to Jesus,” he pled. “Confess your sins and be saved.”
Feeling secure in my salvation, regardless of whether or not God approved of my musical choices, I remained seated in the pew with my head down.
Conversely, fully half of the pews on the main floor emptied as their occupants crawled over each other to find space in the aisles in which to bemoan their disappointments with earthly life. My mother was among them, still not having looked or spoken a word in my direction for the entirety of the event.
From all directions, the adults who remained upright swooped in like vultures. They reached out to grab hold of my hands, wrap their arms around my shoulders and raise me from my seat, guiding my elbow in the direction of my mother.
“Go to her,” they implored. “She’s crying. She needs you. She loves you.”
I rose to escape them and stepped out uncomfortably, trying to avoid the masses and straddling some poor woman’s legs as I searched for a path back towards my mother. Mom’s normally steely façade was twisted into mock despair, and I detected a smirk on her face as she finally looked up and caught my eye. It was now that the preacher saw an opportunity for glory, and wasn’t about to miss out on the chance.
“You child,” he sang out, “in the black!” as if there were any doubt as to whom he referred.
I turned uncomfortably to face him.
“Come forward and be healed!” he demanded.
I hesitated, weighing my odds of escape should I choose to make a run for it, but decided they weren’t good considering I was already being pushed forward by the ever-so-helpful horde. I found myself, not of my own free will, at the foot of the pulpit with no direction to go other than up the three steps. The eagerly waiting preacher sensed my obvious discomfort and called to a church elder to escort me the rest of the way.
“This young lady is possessed by a demon,” the preacher declared. The congregation gasped; it seemed the show was going to be better than expected this evening.
“I want y’all to join me in praying for this poor creature’s soul so that the Spirit of the Lord will enter her and reclaim her from Satan!” the preacher requested of his audience.
“Now, the deacon is going to stand behind her to catch her because, when the demon leaves her body, she’ll faint!” It was a powerful claim to make. I was sure everyone would be disappointed when it didn’t work out as promised.
“Lord, she is but your humble servant,” the preacher began his prayer, “and she needs your help to be rid of this evil demon who has taken her over and caused her to stray from your ways…” The prayer rambled on, but I blocked out the rest as I prayed my own prayer that the rapture would come and remove me from this uncomfortable scene.
I was a painfully shy teenager who hated the spotlight. My dark wardrobe allowed me to be an extra alongside a cast of similarly dressed characters. Usually. Today it had assigned me a starring role in someone else’s play.
Abruptly, the preacher’s rhythmic plea ended and he lunged in my direction, bringing his face within inches of mine as he screamed, “DEMON, BE GONE!!!”
Shaken, I stumbled backwards to escape the spittle and hot breath. The deacon was prepared for this. He kept his feet firmly planted so that, as I tripped over them, I fell backwards into his waiting arms. A cheer rose up from the triumphant crowd, drenched in all their stained-glass glory and convinced that the demon had left my body as commanded.
Twenty minutes later I found myself holding butter cookies in one hand and a paper cup full of juice in the other, standing uncomfortably between the preacher and my mother in a long fellowship hall to the right of the sanctuary. There would be no dinner tonight.
The preacher leaned in closely and whispered, “You weren’t actually possessed.”
“I knew she wasn’t,” my mother offered in surprise defense of me.
Yet the two of them seemed determined to keep it their little secret as the conversation moved on to less uncomfortable topics.
“How about a free T-shirt?” the preacher offered.
He walked over to a folding table on the other side of the room where the church’s youth group was selling T-shirts. They were fundraising for a mission trip to some third-world country that I bet had never seen an exorcism performed before.
The preacher spoke words I couldn’t hear to a girl who looked my way in an effort to gauge my size. She dug through the pile and handed him a shirt. He handed it back to her with what must have been a request for any color other than black. She nodded and replaced the shirt in his outstretched hand with one in white.
Mom resumed her silence on the drive home, but extended the olive branch of gospel music rather than subject me to further radio sermons of fire-and-brimstone.
The next day I went to school wearing a brand new, white T-shirt proclaiming, “All parties in hell have been cancelled due to fire.” Thankfully my friends, in their dark apparel and matching countenance, were amused by the story of the white shirt, but only enough to hear it once as any more than that would have made them uncomfortable.