A week ago, I snorted Victor’s love out of my veins and coughed it up in a bathroom in a gas station in Stockton, a place for back breaking farewells and soiled departures. The bathroom was uglier than sin and it smelled of piss and rape and the sweet fruit of suicide like the rotted abscess in my soul.

For a year and half of my life, I devoted myself to Victor: a dark haired, dimpled man who was four years older than me and possessed both the innate ability to quench my lifelong thirst for pure love and the chilling maniacal edge that imprisoned me in a living black and blue nightmare.

I was nineteen when I met Victor. For me, love with another man was an elusive thing that I had only caught glimpses of in secretive backseats with frustrated football players and curious Latin men who had been hindered by Catholicism and street life machismo.

I met Victor beneath the kaleidoscope blur of the spiraling lights in a run down dance club that served watered down drinks and false hopes to its young and impressionable pretty boy clientele. He, with a beer bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other, leaning against the bar, bearing an expression of appealing nonchalance. Me, the centrifugal force of my friends who, unlike me, were over privileged and way too attractive for their own good. It was a Wednesday night in February when slivers of rain tapped against the metal roof of the dingy bar and competed with the lustful beat of seductive dance music. Through smoke and unspoken inhibitions, Victor’s curiosity found me, focused on me and with the last swallow of his third beer, determination formed until I became a mission.

After the gyration of hips, the brushing of lips, the clasp of hands and meshed fingers locking into place and the exchange of smoldering and suggestive stares, we entered each other’s lives, never to return to the somewhat vague innocence we had clung to up until that moment.

I was in my first year of college, balancing my time between a full-time job as a cashier at a fast food restaurant, the captain of the cheerleading team and the president of the drama club. I had a full load of classes, a large circle of friends and a sudden sense of independence, living on my own and both thrilled and crippled by the fear of an uncertain future.

Victor was engaged to a girl named Melissa and lived nearly three hours away in a tender place called Heart’s Bridge. He explained this to me, during our first phone conversation after our initial meeting. In hushed tones, he confessed that no one knew about him as his sexuality was something he had struggled to keep hidden for years. He planned to end his relationship with Melissa and pursue one with me. By our third long distant call, Victor stumbled over his feelings for me and declared to both of us that I was something he could no longer live without. It wasn’t an admission of love, but it was enough for me to load up a friend’s car with my belongings, quit my job, withdraw from school and disappear to the small farming town. There, Victor lived in a run down farmhouse, which he had inherited from his grandfather. It was the ideal place for the two of us to escape from anything and everyone who had plagued us. It was a place in which we could create a false sense of reality and try to undo all the damage that had been done to us, by the expectations of our families or the cruel and brutal rejection of society.

In the beginning, life with Victor was filled with an unexplainable bliss; an ultimate euphoria that neither one of us had experienced. In the first three months, I don’t think we spoke to anyone, except for Milton, the television crazed old man who owned the hardware store that Victor worked in five days a week.

It was when our shared joy started to slip into a sort of pattern that quickly became redundant and routine that everything changed. The axis in our world shifted and Victor’s inner rage began to peek out of his soul in quick, frightening flashes, like lightning.

The drugs contributed to it. Three months after we met, Victor introduced me to crank: a man made substitute for cocaine which contained substances like baby powder, laundry detergent and other household goods that could guarantee at least an eight hour high in which your scalp tingles, your ideas seemed fueled and ambitious and your love for another person seemed invincible.

Victor had gotten the drugs from his friends, a couple named Ray and Cindy who lived in a grungy apartment in town. At first, my reluctance to participate in doing drugs prompted Victor to pressure me even more. As if it were a challenge to him, he would beg, plead and promise that if I would just try it once, I would be able to share the experience with him. He hoped that this would bring us even closer together.

The first time I did the drug, I immediately felt a sense of freedom as if all of my thoughts and ideas had been unlocked and I was suddenly able to form them, even those that were the most complex.

The downside of the drug was “coming down” from the intense high. A depression deeper and darker than I had ever known would set in and would reduce me to tears and irrational thought.

This process for Victor was unbearable. He struggled with years of self-hatred and guilt over his existence and the inner turmoil that his sexuality had riddled his soul with, like a disease. At first, he would punch things: a wall, a pillow, a door. Then, inevitably, it was my turn.

I remember the first time that I was hit: an overcast day in June that seemed to loom over us like a hovering shadow from heaven. I was sitting in the kitchen, clinging to a glass of orange juice and an insurmountable sadness. Victor walked into the kitchen, standing in the doorway like an intruder, bare-chested and wearing a pair of olive green shorts that hung loosely around his hips. His feet were bare and the white kitchen floor made his skin appear even warmer and darker, like milk and coffee. He stared at me with an intensity that tiptoed down my spine like a thousand dandelions. I swallowed back a sudden wave of unexplainable fear as I was silently terrorized by the frighteningly cold expression in his usually comforting eyes.

His words crawled out of his mouth like slow burning acid. “I am so sick of you.”

I was muted by fear. I remember my eyes darted to the back door, which led out to the barn. I contemplated my escape, not sure why I needed one from someone that I loved.

Victor moved suddenly, furious, so fast that I didn’t even have time to blink, to move, to run. He ripped the glass of orange juice out of my hand and threw its contents in my face. I dripped pieces of pulp from my chin and the juice stung my eyes, temporarily blinding me. I heard the glass explode, thrown against the yellow and green wallpaper. Victor’s hand was in my hair, not pulling, but shoving me, face first into the surface of the kitchen table. Not once, not twice, but three times. Blood gushed from my nose and mixed with the sweet stickiness of the juice. My bottom lip split open and I tasted blood, coughing and choking on it.

“Look at this fucking mess you’ve made!” Victor’s voice bellowed in my ears as he stood over me, dwarfing me.

In that instant, everything between us changed. My fear suddenly subsided and a flood of sorrow surged through me in quick currents. I went numb as Victor grabbed the back of my head, his long fingers grabbing a fistful of hair. He yanked and I flew back, out of the chair, which fell to the floor, landing on its side. I reached for the rounded edges of the table, but my fingers slipped off of the cool surface as I was pulled across the kitchen floor, towards the back of the house, to the bathroom. I struggled, grasping for anything that would secure my freedom. Victor shook me violently, his bare foot stomping on my chest, to quiet me, to subdue me, to push the fight out of me like air.

I heard the squeak of the faucets in the bathtub as Victor turned them on. Water began to fill the old claw footed tub and I twisted and I turned and I reached for the edge of the tub, hoping for enough leverage to get me up and off of the bathroom floor. Victor braced his knee under my chin and air was shoved out of my throat. I felt my body start to convulse, with sobs and with the struggle for breath. Victor pulled me up by the collar of my t-shirt and for a second our eyes met and I pleaded silently with him to stop. He ignored my attempt and I was shoved face first into the rising bath water, the liquid scalding my face like flames. Victor’s hand, tight across the back of my neck, controlling. He pulled me up, my head jolted back and sprayed the bathroom walls with water. He made a second attempt to shove me back into the water, but I braced my hands on the edge of the tub, resisting until my knuckles turned white. I turned to the right, jamming my elbow into his ribs, which caused him to stumble back, cascading with the toilet bowl and a flowered wastebasket.

In that moment, I escaped, running through the house. I heard him behind me, his rage intensified by the pursuit. I dove into the hall closet in the living room, colliding with coats, umbrellas and a vacuum cleaner. I pulled the door shut behind me, clinging to the brass doorknob with every ounce of strength I could muster.

I heard drawers in the kitchen opening. The sharpness of my own breath filled the dark closet like a symphony of terror. The only source of light was that which leaked under the closet door. I kept one hand on the doorknob and with the other, I fumbled in the dark, searching for something – anything – that could be used to defend me against the man that I loved. Coat hangers flew in the cramped space, their rounded tips scratching the skin on my arms.

Something sharp had suddenly pierced the skin around my left ankle. Under the door, Victor had slid a long kitchen knife, the kind used to cut thick loaves of bread. He slid the blade, back and forth, in huge canvassing movements. I backed away from the door as far as I could, still clutching the doorknob. I felt my back pressed against Victor’s black leather jacket. My left foot was smashed against the two-pronged electrical plug of the vacuum. The blade slid under the door again, like a snake, anxious to make contact with my skin. I moved my feet, arching my back and still keeping my fingers gripped over the brass knob.

Within seconds, the house fell silent until I heard the front screen door creak open and slam shut. The roar of the engine of Victor’s car released both a sudden relief and outburst of uncontrollable tears.

In the hours that passed, I plotted and planned my escape. I would wait until he went to work and then I would hitchhike to the bus depot and board a Greyhound to safety. I would return to my former life and take comfort in the solace of my friends.

Instead, Victor returned, high and apologetic, with a newfound gleam of love in his eyes. A shine that I held onto in the frequent darkness that would soon follow and ensue.

Yes, I stayed with him and after six months, to make me love him again, we went to Santa Cruz and secretly contemplated jumping off of the highest cliff. Instead, we made absentminded seaside love and we tried to force the thrill as Victor ignored the gift of bruises he had given me on my arms, legs, back and hands and said, “Happy anniversary.”

Years later I would be asked, “Why did you stay?” My reply was an awkward glance in the opposite direction, a tender shrug of my shoulders and a muttered, “I loved him.”

I remember the day that Victor says we need a change. And how I think to myself, moving vans won’t help us, dear, and neither will that money from your folks. The writing is already etched in to the wall and it makes me want to take a razor and carve times' itch in to my skin next to his initials, like blood crusted half-moons. I resist the temptation like I should have resisted him. We move someplace new and the view is pretty fucking ugly, if anyone asks me. But no one does. Victor locks himself in the bathroom and complains about his adoptive parents and his little hometown that almost noosed his neck. He only calls my name when the others won’t come.

I make the bed. I fold the bathroom towels. I rearrange the cans of peas and corn in the kitchen cupboards. I scrub the kitchen floor on hands and knees, until my palms blister and peel. I do anything I can to maintain a sense of family and home. It is all that I have to hold onto.

This all started when I was a whore from the city who fell in love with some small-town guy after a slow dance in a cheap bar near the train tracks. I only wanted a swimming pool. But I should have known that if I couldn't float, neither could he.

I thought life would be pretty with a hardware man and his artwork, living in the middle of nowhere. But in an orchard he raped and stung and cheated and drank and drew the life out of me.

I was so tired and worn down by rites and wrongs and the calm ticking of contemplation. The sorrowful whimper of the wind that breathed and beat. It took years before I could say it. “He beats me.” I asked him once why he did it and Victor said, “To keep you going, to keep you alive and aligned.”

I replied, “Send angels.” But no one did.

 

© 2004 David Matthew Barnes - Contributor's Bio