Wheel in the Sky

I left home for good the winter of 1995. I was clocking almost ten years of sexual abuse at that point and a good three years of physical and verbal abuse. I had been suspended twice in junior high for fighting and was the scapegoat for everything fucked up my household. I was the resident slave, tasked with cleaning the house and picking up after the drunks. I was done.

 I spent the next six months couch surfing and sleeping outside. It was winter in Alaska so it was cold and snow covered. I would find deep piles of snow and dig out burrows to sleep in over at the park adjacent to Baxter Bog. I would squat in abandoned buildings downtown with the drunk pedophiles and fucked up young folks. The police would find me from time to time, toss me in McLaughlin Youth Center and toss me back out. I continued to attend school, as it was the only stable sanctuary I could find. Most teachers turned a blind eye to my deteriorating physical and mental state until I got into trouble in English class for falling asleep, drooling on my notebook and sliding out of the chair. I was sent to the principal's office where I unloaded my life. I still remember the look on that principal's face. He was probably in his mid-30's, with a full beard and a fitted plaid shirt. The look of horror and helplessness that emerged and remained on his face made me feel guilty for bringing this to him. I knew firsthand that this shit was overwhelming. He informed me that he was mandated to report this to the police and I was happy to hear it.

About an hour later, a detective from the Anchorage Police Department showed up at the school to take me to the police station and record my statement. She was an older woman, probably in her mid-fifties. She was stoic and all business but nice enough. I was brought to the police station in the back seat of a cop car and escorted into a soundproof room equipped with a set of government-issued table and chairs and a recording device. We spent what felt like two days going over everything that had happened in my household to date. She then led me to a small waiting room filled with children's toys and a TV blaring some sort of cartoon. The reception was so shitty and my brain was so fogged that I couldn't tell, nor did I really give a shit. It is unclear how long I was in that children's waiting room but I do know that I slept the hardest and darkest that I have ever slept. No dreams, no recollection of falling asleep or waking. I was sleeping the sleep of the dead.

I was woken up by the same detective, told I was going to need to call my parents to do a wiretap on their phone to try to get them to confess what they did over the wiretap. I hadn't spoken to them for months. The detective set up the wiretap equipment and made the call, giving me no direction on how exactly I was supposed to get them to confess all of this over the phone. The wiretap failed. It was a five minute phone call, answered by my stepfather, who proceeded to verbally abuse me over the phone and hang up. "Well, guess that's not going to work", the detective sighed, as she shuffled me into the back of another police car.

I was transported to Covenant House, the only youth shelter in Anchorage. I was passed off to some intake staff and told that I was going to stay here for an emergency overnight while they got me hooked up with a CPS worker and completed the process of making me a temporary ward of the state.

That emergency overnight turned into almost a year. In my typical fashion, I created order out of chaos and had my daily routine of getting up to shower for school in the group shower, get my sack lunch and two bus tokens and take the People Mover, Anchorage's public transit system, to school. I'd come home and eat government cheese and jailhouse slop off the food line at the shelter and go to bed.

I bunked with a girl named Mariah in a room that held about six girls at a time. I had the top bunk and she was below me. She was a beautiful girl too and had the same hair and features as Alanis Morrissette. She was my age but had the looks and figure of a girl in her 20's. We became close, two girls bonded in our trauma. She had been brutally sexually abused by her grandfather. One night, she had come back from the showers and the room filled with the smell of rotten fish. Other girls started to remark and make cracks about the smell and I saw Mariah looking sheepish and ashamed on the edge of her lower bunk. I asked her if she wanted to come up to my bunk for a little bit and she agreed. She confessed to me that the smell was her-her grandfather had stuck scissors up her vagina and caused major damage. The smell was a side effect of that physical damage. We spent the rest of the night listening to Journey's "Wheel in the Sky" on tape before we fell asleep next to each other. A week later she was gone. I never knew what happened to her.