in my father’s shadow

As a young girl I was a very ambitious being.

I didn’t realize that I was competing with my father for my mother’s attention and the world’s love. He was the James Bond of early IC.

I was lost in a world of books and ideas, coffee, booze, and cigarettes, thinking myself a literary being or wanting to be one. I didn’t understand about being female as I was damaged by having been kneed in the crotch as a chlld and by an early pregnancy and an abortion that I had blocked out. I was a “lady knight,” called in a way not all women are and, yes, called by the pimp at the Port Authority in New York who was mentioned obliquely in my college personal essay (“similar minions of man and nature…”) to be a “lady of the night.” That was when I ran away from home before senior year in high school. Then, I wrote my college personal essay about it. (He said, “Black men have bigger dicks.”) (But, i got away from him.) (But, obviously, I didn’t.) (In college I became promiscuous.)

In high school I was virginal. My best English paper was “The Scholar Gypsy.” I adored my English teacher.

My father blew it for me. By trying to touch me. I may never understand what that was about. They say, don’t try to understand your abuser.

Let this be the last time this ever needs to be mentioned.