Journal of the Dangerous Mountains Literary Society
Larissa Shmailo

Kathy: Driving with My Eyes Closed

I was almost five years sober when I began to steal again. I was taking care of my sister’s kid, who was active, and her little boy, who was three; my sister was out there. My father was in his 34th detox and was calling me every day, asking for cigarettes, telling me what to do for my mother and sister.

I started shop lifting, trash mostly, I don’t know why—nothing was different, my family was always this way…Soon after I started to drive with my eyes closed, On the highway, where a little girl was raped and sodomized and killed and stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car. You remember, the Toyota tot… there on the highway I would shut my eyes…

My family doesn’t understand what I’m doing in rehab; of course they want me back out where I can take care of then. My mother keeps saying what about your job; she complains that she’s too old to look after a baby; I love Anthony but my mother should be complaining to my niece, it's her kid, or Heather, but they’re both too busy getting high so we can’t interrupt that just for me… sometimes I think they really want me dead.

Lorraine: Budding Artist

I was the only one in the second grade who could draw a human figure, the first one… When the boys found out they made me draw girls in bathing suits. When my father saw the pictures, he told me I was asking for it. In fourth grade, I did a report on Switzerland—I spelled it Switzerland—and I wrote in the report that Switzerland was very pretty, but that it had many dangerous mountains. When the boys heard that, they ganged up on me after school; they wanted to see my dangerous mountains. My father said I was a tramp for getting raped, and he raped me too.

When I met Michael I was immediately attracted to him. I went from Valpolicella to crack, from an editor’s job to fencing stolen televisions in six months.

Celia: Saps

I know that men are either saps or bastards and a sap can become a bastard at any moment if you don’t sleep with him: the nice grocery store man who smiles as you walk by: “Hi darling” he says—and if you don’t say hello and thank him for admiring your tits, thank him for the Oh baby I wanna suck ya fuck ya greeting, he turns mean: Bitch cunt dyke whore…

I’ve had five abortions; my father sodomized me from the time I was three. You can’t say no to anyone without a fight.

Jane: First Amendment Absolutist

I was always a rugged individualist; I believed in personal liberty, full license in behavior. So I applauded the fact that my older brother incested me all my life as an expression of his freedom, as something that helped make me what I am, something that helped forge my sexual identity. The only problem was that I was four.

Rita: Responsibility

I was always a little adult. I can’t remember ever being a child like other children; I had very grave responsibilities at a very early age, my mother’s happiness, making sure my father didn’t abandon us…these were my duties: they told me so…When I was five I used to perform cunnilingus on my mother and let my father sodomize me… I could have stopped it, but I didn’t.

Tally: Grandma’s Apron

When I was small we lived in the South in a house with three stories. We lived on the third floor. My mother died when I was born; my father worked and my grandmother used to take care of us. She used to hate my father, telling him she would kill him for what he was doing to me.

One day she killed herself, threw herself out of the window. Her apron got caught in the telephone wire; I guess no one could get it down; it hung there for months.

Eleanor: Living with Corpses

We lived over a funeral parlor for a while, Tattenfeld’s Funeral Parlor. It was around the time my father died, either just before or just after; he wanted to see me and my mother wouldn’t let me, called him “baby bugger.” I was about twelve; we moved a lot, sometimes to get away from my father, sometime because my mother was a schizophrenic and we got thrown out of places a lot, or we got behind on the rent and left before they evicted us.

The funeral parlor was in one of those big Boston houses; there was a kitchen where they kept the display coffins. I don’t know if it was a dream, but I remember a man from the funeral parlor taking me downstairs to the cellar where they had the corpses. They were in a cold storage room on shelves; he showed me the dead bodies to show me that they weren’t anything to be afraid of; he patted and touched me while he made me look. They were pale, white and I remember feeling sorry for them. But I used to dream that the corpses were coming up the stairs…my mother didn’t understand why I would be afraid…

April: Perpetrators

I was molested by a priest in Sunday school at age seven. When I asked another priest for help at age 24, he saw me coming.

I didn’t want to go to kindergarten. My kindergarten teacher, a large masculine phallic woman resembling my mother, was the reason.

Papa liked to fondle me in front of Mama; he would tie her up and fondle me. He liked to come on my face when I was very small. I was still in my crib when he would masturbate himself in front of me. Later on there was rape and penetration, especially when he was angry. He used to sodomize me in the living room when there was no one around. I would sit on his lap in his armchair. There was oral sex too; he would force his penis deep into my throat, too deep. I would gag and choke, wishing he would take it out of my mouth.

My grandfather felt me up at the movies; I would give him a hand job as we watched the show, Snow White or Bambi. At home I would suck his flaccid penis; it was very hard to get him up, to get him off, and I would have to work and work at it; I learned how to do it though, and fast. He died when I was three. I was taken to say goodbye to him—I waved to him from the car, an old green Ford shaped like a pig. I remember his face framed by the hospital window. I felt nothing that day, but he took care of me. He fed me, even if I did have to give him sex for it. I wished it had been my mother instead.

My mother loathed me, loathed me just for being needy like any kid. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, started to take care of me then. She used to play with me in closet too.

I remember when I was eighteen. Nathan is tucking me in the little bedroom in Queens, going fun-tilt boogy. My grandmother enters the room and acts—I thought she ‘acted’—as through she sees nothing, just as though this pumping butt and tangle of teenage legs isn’t there. She just takes something from the dresser and walks out of the room. I waited for her to mention it, my puritanical grandmother, and nothing, nothing ever. Was it that way when my grandfather was fucking my mother, was she blind then too? Is that why my mother always hated her so?

I remember my mother was angry, always angry when I was small. I remember her stabbing me with diaper pins and twisting my arms and feet, pulling my hair as she combed it. I remember her dressing me up like a little dutch boy; then she liked me. Why? Did I suck the revolting bitch’s cunt?

My mother started to medicate me when I was very young, giving me pills, food, putting things into my mouth to keep me sleeping to keep me calm to keep my needs from intruding upon her. My child needs enraged her, angered her enough to kill. To this day, I dream of her standing over my crib. I am telling her that I am her daughter, begging her not to kill me, but she is mad. How many times did she try to kill me as an infant? Once she shoved a tin soldier down my throat. I still dream of her standing over my crib, holding a pillow…

I learned early to keep myself drugged and happy, always happy—to be unhappy was death, she could and would kill you, the rage she felt when I asked her for something could kill you…I asked her why she was so angry; don’t ask, she said, don’t ask.

I was a good baby, according to her; unlike Olga who cried a lot, I slept all the time…

Maybe Mama tried to kill me because she felt it was better to die than submit; to this day she regrets not having died with the resistance in the war. Did her father offer her food for sex like he did me? She was willing to starve back then, was thin as a rail as a girl. Now the anorexic is a huge woman, a lioness finally big enough to protect her cubs…but she didn’t, never did, never will. She would rather see me dead than tell the truth…

When Papa was drunk his soul blasted he would tie her up and molest me in front of her like torture, like his sister and his mother in the camps were raped and tortured in front of him. She told me to call the police. I remember coming down the steps, my mother tied up upstairs, my father torturing her, her whispering to me call the police call the police. Someone stopped me, threw me down the stairs, later they said I fell. Olga was there watching and she knows what happened, but Olga is loyal and knows that if you don’t recite the party line the whole family can blow apart, blow into bits: my father would leave and then there would he nothing left except my mother…

It’s easier to be angry at Mama than Papa I was trained from an early age don’t tell your father, don’t hurt your father. Why? Because drunk, or angry, my passive-aggressive father could and would kill you, beat you… my father had no consciousness no conscience…he played with me like the Nazis played with his sister like the Nazis like his own father torturing his mother and sister before him how glad he was when his father was taken and shot…

I remember thinking that my father was weak despising him yet I loved him once did he break me in did he make me a good wife a good piece to all my pimps?

I loved my Father even though he didn’t love me even though he used me like a careless child would use a toy or a toilet he was my only source of affection and he betrayed me gave me to the others. When did he start tucking me beating me raping me when did it start how long did it go on did I like it at first was it play when I was three? When did I become a battered woman, a victim, at six at seven? At three?

The ants I am on the ground in the back yard in the garage covered with ants…the ants crawling on me…I played in the garage with my friends…I had toys there…I was sodomized there…my hymen busted in the basement my ass humped in the garage…

Don’t blame me for your problems my father used to say to Olga and me, don’t blame me for your problems.

Did Mama find me with my father or grandfather, did I try to tell her, did he deny everything, call me a liar—did I try to tell papa what my grandfather was doing, what Mama was doing? What happened on the stairs?

When I was molested on the subway at age 12—I was molested often, felt up by men in crowded subway cars—I told my mother; she said I had those kind of eyes..

My father and Olga in the basement, my mother hysterical, refusing to go down herself but screaming at me what are they doing down there, what are they doing…

My father smoking in the basement, staring at the ceiling; Olga on the couch in the basement, her cigarettes hidden under the mattress with his condoms….Olga looking, at the ceiling smoking, smoking: that’s flow they know they’re human, my father said.

Inside me is a brave little two year old, a brave little girl in boy’s clothing, calling the police. Inside is also a dead child, a dead girl, a child wanting to be dead rather than face life on these terms. She stares back at me in the mirror with dead hopeless eyes…This is the child raped by a neighbor in the garage, whose father knew she was raped heard saw knew and did nothing didn’t lift a finger: my dearest don’t blame your problems on me…

The dead eyes of the dead girl staring at me… her slashed wrists that no one notices, nails bitten to the quick, picking ‘her skin to allay anxiety to keep from screaming…my left thigh, my itching cunt how it hurt when I lost—was it really then?—my virginity. I screamed and screamed and was so ashamed of screaming but I couldn’t help it it hurt it hurt and so he gagged me and I prayed that my mother or my grandmother or someone would make him take it out of my mouth please make him take it out of my mouth…

Mama was too fat to mount when Papa came the first time I thought he had died he passed out. I was a good girl I cleaned up the blood from my broken seven year old hymen no one no one no one ever knew not even me. I bound myself up, wiped the blood away and threw away the bloody towels.

Later I slashed my wrists like Mira like the girl in the whorehouse like the woman on the bus I slashed my wrists only once when I was eighteen in Switzerland I stared at the basement ceiling trying to be dead knowing that when the pain gets too great I could always cut I could always cut myself like he cut my hymen and I forgot for a moment the pain of the other.

And I still loved him, continued to love him but he gave me to others let me be raped in the garage by brutal pig-like men…

I am in the garage I am waiting for help waiting for my father he knows I am being raped my mother knows but they don’t come. The knots in my shoulders like two hands clenching my shoulders holding me down, holding me immobilized…pushing me down, pumping in me and holding me down…

And later docile, I put my hands over my head, I turned I did anything the men asked but I hated them, loathed them…learned how to get them off get them off me fast as fast as I could…

On my stomach ass up my back hurts, my legs hurt my fists clench my shoulders and neck are tight they hurt my jaws tight and clenched. I hold a toy, a little lamb…

My jaws are clenched: he pries my mouth open, pours cold water on my head so that I will open my mouth…the smell of Lucky Strike cigarettes. I am sick; I shudder; I pray wordlessly that I will die…

I know I am not wanted no matter what they say.

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Larissa Shmailo has been published in About Poetry, Rattapallax, BigBridge.org!, and many other publications. Her recent poetry CD, The No-Net World, has received excellent reviews. Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun; a DVD of the original English-language production is part of the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. She recently contributed translations to the anthology New Russian Poets forthcoming from the Dalkey Archive Press.