Pink Elephants

“Want some pills?”

I looked up from my lap, wiped away the tears, and saw Serenity O’Connor towering over me. Her hand was extended, as if feeding a goat. We were in the stairwell of our high school.

“What are they?” I asked. This was the first time I had ever spoken to Serenity. I had just turned 15. No one knew how old she was. But she was older — she had to have been.

“Just some shit I got from the doctor.”

“How much should I take?”

“Stick your tongue out.”

I stuck my tongue out. She flipped her hand.

“Doof, you, have, water?” I managed.

“Be a baller. You don’t need water,” she said.

I manufactured saliva — a skill I wore as a badge of honor in my adult life — and swallowed.

A few months before meeting Serenity, I had set up shop in the laundry room, chugged a bottle of rum, and smashed it to pieces. I used the shards of glass to cut my arms. I listened to Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” as I did it. I kept reaching for my iPod, with bloody fingers, to restart the song — it’s only two-and-a-half minutes long.

During our endless fights, there usually came a point when you stretched out on my bed, and lowered your voice. You would try to reason with me then. During one of these intervals, I said,

“You don’t understand me,” in typical 14-year-old fashion.

“How do you know that?”

“Why do I like Bob Dylan?”

“The same reason I did,” you said, solemnly.

Ouch. Check mate.

It’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see…

I ripped the skin swiftly, like swiping a credit card. I couldn’t stop. I must have learned to like pain, somewhere along the way.

A soul-shattering gasp brought me back to consciousness. You dropped your laundry basket — you seemed to be holding laundry at all times — and fell to you knees. You grabbed my arms.

“JACK?! What did you do? What the HELL did you do?!”

You could not withhold your love for me or Ruby even if you wanted to. We liked being your children. You were physically affectionate, to an excessive degree — a trait I inherited.

Many mornings, you kissed me on the forehead to wake me up for school. And not just when I was little — you did this right up until I graduated high school. You never flicked the lights on and barked at me, or jerked me awake. Looking back, it’s kind of weird — smooching your 18-year-old son like that. But it was sweet.

You also had violent bursts of rage — a trait I also, regrettably, inherited.

After Serenity fed me the pills, I wandered back to “workshop” (thanks for paying for arts school, by the way) and took a seat.

Mo Hickey, the 18-year-old punk goddess, who, over Christmas break, had declared me her boyfriend, and then broken up with me on mushrooms, was in the middle of a story. I was heartbroken over Mo, and would often run to the hallways and cry when she read her work aloud.

I stared at her toes — which her friends affectionately referred to as moes — and got a slight boner. Her story was beautiful. Again, I felt like crying.

“Yes, it’s a cop-out, the non-beginning,” Mo read, “But a successful one, for this story has begun.”

Then I felt a tingling. Then a weightlessness. Then a dreariness — this wasn’t like the mushrooms Mo had fed me only weeks earlier. This wasn’t mind expanding — this was mind deadening. And that’s what I wanted. That’s what I had always wanted. No more thoughts. No more ideas. No more pain.

I got the orgasm-brain.
My eyes fluttered.

These pills weren’t trying to correct my faulty wiring, like the ones prescribed by discount psychiatrists — these were simply pouring water on the mainframe. All I had to do was sit back and watch whole damn system spark out in a blaze of glory.

I knew life would never be the same.

The next few months were a blackout — a pattern-forming, life-altering blackout. Serenity provided the pills, and I referred her customers. I have no idea if you or Mom knew how bad things had really gotten. I know we were fighting all the time, but I wasn’t there, mentally.

At some point during this haze — I have very little memory of it — Serenity asked,

“You wanna take a ride with me?”

Her friend Taylor parked beneath a bridge, a block away from school. Serenity unbuckled her seatbelt, crouched between the seats, and rested her elbow on the cup holder. She removed the plastic lining from a bottle top, and put a cotton ball on it. She held up the bottom of a soda can, and dumped a small amount of brown powder on it. (Then water?) She extracted the resulting liquid into a syringe.

“Shit,” she said. She had forgotten something.

She lifted her ass, and struggled to remove her belt. She was not fat, but she had girth. She tied one end of the belt around her arm, and held the other between her teeth.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the belt — the buckle, the frame, the latch…

“YOU THINK YOU HAVE IT BAD?!” you would screech, after one of your patented smackdowns.

“You’re lucky you didn’t have MY dad. He used a BELT.”

You told me about The Belt so many times, it became a mythic figure in my mind, like a Devil Cobra sprouting from Hell, and striking the helpless the Earth, for no reason at all.

Let’s face it, your dad was a dick, and a narcissist — you knew it, everyone knew it. And I’m sure he warped you. And I’m sure he didn’t feel guilty about it — or at least not to the degree that you did, for whooping me.

I’ve got this podcast coming out called Revelations with Jack Dunphy. (A podcast is like a radio show, kind of.) In it, I talk about my issues with addiction, loss, mental health, etc., in a way that’s hopefully funny, and I interview artists with similar struggles. In the first episode, I interview Ruby.

We discuss, among other things, how violent our household could be.

I’m torn about putting it out.

On the one hand, it’s my lived experience – it’s my truth, as they say (these are buzzwords, I guess, but they’re accurate). Unpacking trauma, with the intention of helping others and myself in the process seems like a good thing to do. On the other hand, you’re not exactly here to defend yourself. And talking publicly about the beatings you subjected me to reduces you to one ugly part of your past. I don’t believe in such reductionism. I know that your rage was only part of you — as it is only a part of me — and that we are, all of us, the sum of our parts. Not just the parts.

I watched the needle disappear into the crook of Serenity’s arm. Then it was Taylor’s turn.

I knew I was witnessing something many don’t, especially at such a young age. I refused to look away. I remembered a Werner Herzog quote:

“The poet must not divert his eyes.”

They lay motionless. Their breathing was shallow. I wondered if they were dead. Serenity snorted back to life. Taylor left the car to smoke, which seemed planned. Serenity crawled into the backseat, and cuddled up next to me.

“There’s a hole near your crotch,” she smiled, with half-shut eyes.

I was not attracted to Serenity, nor did I like talking with her. But she fed me as many pills as I wanted, and it felt good to be desired, especially after being dumped. She was a good distraction from the shitshow at home. I let her call me her boyfriend.

When Serenity kissed me, I wasn’t thinking about Mo, or how I was failing out of school, or how strained my relationship with you had become. I wasn’t thinking about kissing either. When her tongue slugged down my throat, I disappeared, mentally. I had become skilled in the art of leaving the physical, and going somewhere far away in my mind from years of being hit by you.

At some point as a child, I made the decision not to cry or beg when you would unleash on me. I vowed not to let you know how much pain I was in — That’s what he wants, I told myself. I made a sport out of seeing how much pain I could withstand without emitting so much as a whimper. The pain became exciting, pleasurable even. To this day, I’ve never felt like more of a man than when I was hit as a boy.

It’s a tricky thing, deciding which details of your life to make public. My intention is to arrange the more delicate facts of my life in a way that tells a story, and by deep-diving into the personal, reveal something true about the universal. I want to believe I am not self-victimizing — and if I am, I fear my impulse to do so is predicated upon a subconscious, or even conscious, effort to negate the problematic, abusive things I’ve done. Like, if I’m a victim, I can’t be held accountable for my own transgressions.

It seems like you can’t be seen nowadays unless you frame yourself as a victim. And who doesn’t want to be seen?

So many transgressors start out as victims. Someone is hit as a child — victim. Victim grows up to hit their child —

And once the thin line between victim and transgressor is crossed, one can never go back. The ex-victim, now transgressor, deserves no sympathy — their case is thrown out, their trauma, moot. We are, all of us, afforded one title in life, and only one title at a time.

“I pulled away slowly / feeling so holy / God knows I was feeling alive…”

Riding the Blue Line to the Oak Park stop, I listened to the solo-acoustic version of Tom Waits’ “Ol’55” on a loop, to settle my nerves. I knew there was a real possibility of danger every time I hung out with Serenity in her neighborhood.

I transcribed the lyrics, over and over again, on my phone. It was a song that played a lot in your car. It was a song that bonded us.

“Now that’s poetry,” you would say, tapping the steering wheel, rhythmically.

Nothing made me happier than when you would approve of a mix CD I made for you. It was like you were approving of me through the songs, and the methodical way I ordered them. I would study your profile. If you started bobbing your head, or rocking out with your neck — a feeling of accomplishment and peace would wash over me.

We parked outside of the Hemingway museum. Serenity took out her instruments. I scanned the darkened, snow-covered streets. I watched blank faces, hidden by hoodies, emerge one by one, then disappear quickly.

She leaned back in her seat. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head. I watched a woman carry a bag of diapers under her arm. Completely different worlds, I thought.

She came to quicker than usual.

“What d’ya wanna do?” she slurred.

I thought about it.

“I wanna do it,” I said.

“What?” Her eyes fluttered.

“Heroin.”

I don’t know what flipped me. Up until that point, I had been determined to stick with pills. But things were so bad at home, nothing seemed to matter. Only a few days earlier, you had found a bottle of vodka in my nightstand cabinet, beside my most cherished stuffed animal, Bagel Bear. I had made him at Build-A-Bear only six years prior. He still had working sound chips in his paws.

“Don’t drop me, I am a grizzly, an endangered species!” the bear would say, in my own high-pitched voice.

I held the bottle to my chest, and made some insane excuse for why I needed it. You snatched it from me. I yanked it back with Hulk-like strength I didn’t know I possessed. You fell backward on to my bed. Your eyes bulged out of your head. I had never seen you afraid before. You later told me that seeing my determination to hold on to that bottle was the scariest thing you’d ever seen.

“I dunno … I’m a bad influence,” Serenity groaned. “But I’m not that bad. Ya know?”

“I wanna do it,” I repeated. “But is there another way besides shooting it?”

“Yah, I mean … You can snort it. That’s easiest.”

“OK. I’ll do that.”

“OK, well …” her head wobbled from side to side, as if doing some kind of slug math.

“Do you have, like, 10 dollars?”

“Yeah,” I muttered, turned off that she would charge me.

I stood on the edge of the diving board looking down at the brown powder. It’s an intense moment when you change your life path forever, and know you’re doing it while you do it. I hesitated, then remembered what you told me about diving when I was eight.

“There’s only one way to do it!”

I positioned the plastic straw in my nostril, with the delicacy of someone putting on a condom — a task I had difficulty with throughout high school. (For years, I thought your Magnums actually fit me, until I realized the tip wasn’t supposed to trail like a cartoonish nightcap.)

Powder flew everywhere.

“Inhale, you fucking retard! Inhale!”

“Wow, I just pulled a real Woody Allen, didn’t I?” I chuckled. She didn’t laugh.

She dumped a tiny bit more onto a CTA card, and handed me the straw.

The powder shot up my nose like a missile. I remember that first sting like I remember the first time my penis entered a vagina.

We cuddled on a couch in her dimly lit basement, and watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, my favorite film at the time.

“The characters aren’t characters,” I rambled.

“They’re metaphors. Like, metaphors for different emotions.”

“Sure, I could see that,” she agreed, kindly.

I paid attention to my body, which tingled, and I thought about all the things I wasn’t thinking about — you, my homework, my heartbreak, my intentions to be a great artist. None of it mattered.

Serenity wrapped her thick legs around mine. Her grey leggings turned me on. The cotton served as a welcome barrier between out bodies. This was the first time I (almost) felt attracted to her.

“God, I feel good,” I repeated, for the hundredth time.

“I want to put you in my pocket and carry you around with me all the time,” Serenity said, tracing my stomach.

“I want that too,” I lied. “I mean … To carry you in my pocket all the time.”

“You can.”

Her lips grazed mine. I ran to the bathroom to throw up.

When I returned, I was dismayed to see she had turned off The Life Aquatic, and replaced it with a Faces of Death VHS.

“It’s like, too good for right now,” she explained.

She kissed me, over and over, wet and sloppy. Chunks of vomit rolled around my teeth. My throat burned from the acid that just passed through it.

She whipped my dick out. No girl had ever done that before. I felt queasy — the high had turned sour. I felt itchy all over, inside of my skin.

She pulled the skin of my dick up and down, speedily, as if in a hurry. This hurt, a lot, as my foreskin was, at the time, inflamed.

It’s called balanoposthitis. It occurs in uncircumcised men, as a result of bacterial infections, fungal infections, and, most commonly, poor hygiene.

As a child, you would pull back my foreskin in the shower, and scrub it with soap, every night. It burned like hell.

“You’re gonna have to learn to do this yourself,” you would say. (This is a sentence I still hear from someone, about something, at least once a month.) Unlike me, you were circumcised. This further othered you from me.

When inflamed, the foreskin becomes so sensitive, sex and masturbation can become intensely pleasurable, even though it hurts. This, however, was not one of those times. My foreskin was so puffy and crusted, it looked like it had pink eye. Each up-down motion of Serenity’s hand further cracked it. I stole a glance. Red gashes crowned the skin. It looked like the velociraptor claw marks that represent the III in the Jurassic Park III poster.

“Slower,” I said. She obliged. This bought me some time.

“I don’t want this. It hurts too much. I’ll never be able to get hard. But this is what boys want, right? This is what men want? Who am I to turn it down?”

“Ow!”

She was going faster than she did before. Why does it hurt so much on the base of my dick? I look down.

Oh my God. She yanked it out through the zipper. Why?!

The teeth of the zipper scrape my penis, taking a little skin off with each up-down motion — I’m bleeding.

I’ve switched from past tense to present tense. You, as a writer, said this was (is?) something a creative writer is permitted to do from time to time, assuming —

She peels off her leggings. Rats. Those were the one thing turning me on here.

Does she expect me to finger her?

Off goes the underwear.

God, please tell me she doesn’t want me to go down on her.

I feel as if I’m about to black out from pain. I turn to Faces of Death. The reporter Christine Chubbuck shoots herself in the head. I shut my eyes.

If I go down on her, at least she’ll stop touching my dick.

She holds my half-hard cock, raises her waist, and positions it beneath her vagina. I crane my neck. I see only silhouettes of our genitals.

Woah. Is this happening?

I’m 15. Fifteen seems like a cool age to lose your virginity. At the very least, I’ll always be able to say, “I lost my virginity at 15.” I’ll be a man. And being a man is very important.

But I’m not hard. How is this going to work, physically?

She spits on her hand.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Don’t you want this?”

It occurs to me that, “Don’t you want this?” was the same thing she said a cop told her when she was 13, as he fingered her in a holding cell.

I try to push her off, gently, so as not to offend, but I can’t. She’s pinning me to the couch. She’s heavy. Why does this feel so familiar?

Oh.

“Stop it!” I plead.

You throw me onto my bed and pin me down with your body. You bend me sideways. Your knees dig into my stomach. I can’t move.

Serenity lowers her hips slowly, like a forklift. The tip of my dick pricks her freshly shaved pubic area.

“Stop!” I yell.

You’re yelling too, I think — too bad yelling alone doesn’t work. That’s why I need to be restrained.

You raise your right hand, unnecessarily high for dramatic effect — WHAM.

All I see is white.

My penis is inside of her. Not all of it, but enough.

“Fuck. She’s a heroin addict. I’m gonna get AIDS.”

“Do you have a condom?” I say.

“Fuck that, I’m goooood,” she says, in a guttural moan.

Your left hand swoops upward, then down, cutting through the air in a hostile whistle, and collides with my other cheek.

WHITE.

My vision comes back for a second, or maybe it doesn’t — all I see are multi- colored blotches on the inside of my eyelids, which I can transform into anything I want, like clouds.

Rhinoceros, Triceratops, Pink Elephant –

Who told me about the Pink Elephant Paradox? Where the harder you try not to think of a Pink Elephant, the more you think of a pink elephant —

WHAM.

“Mhmmm” her moans are genuine, but not exactly pleasurable.

Or did she have a condom?

She’s riding me. Her ass is heavy and flaps against my thighs.

The zipper cuts my dick like shawarma. Her face is blurry, out of focus — I close my eyes.

If I don’t open them, I can’t see you. I can go anywhere I want.

WHAM.

My cheeks vibrate.

Make a game out of it. Don’t plea. Don’t whimper.

You’re a man.

Men like sex. Be grateful it’s happening. This is practice — practice for the girl I really like. Did I say like?

My vision is gone. All I can see is white. Am I blind?

I mean love.

I don’t cum.

Serenity rolls off of me, catches her breath.

You leave my room like a ghost.

I stuff my aching member back into my jeans, and recall one of the last lines of The Life Aquatic:

“We start the voyage home in our wounded vessel.”

My dick burns. Pus stains my leg. Serenity snores. I turn to the TV, to Faces of Death.

You smile back at me from inside the TV — your infectious, ear-to-ear grin that made everything seem OK.

A fog billows in from behind your angular, Semitic face. It fills the room.

“…Can we listen to the mix CD I made you?”

“The CD player’s broken.”

We’re in your 2003 Ford Focus, a physical manifestation of all the compromises you made in life. I don’t know where we’re going.

You don’t look at me. You don’t look at me when you drive. You don’t look at me when you’re mad.

The bump-THUMPS of potholes on a South Side road break up the silence.

Dare I speak? Dare I ask the question I so want to ask?

“… Can we listen to the radio, please?”

“The only time you ever say ‘please’ is when you want music. ‘Pleeeease, Daddy, please can we have music?”

I hate it when you mock me. I look out the window.

Whiteness, only whiteness, moving slowly, like molasses. My favorite shapes appear — rhinoceros, triceratops —

“Put on that stupid rock band,” you smile. I turn. You’re Nice Dad now.

I put on the Ween CD I burned you. You laugh at the vulgar lyrics and rock out with your neck. My heart lifts.

“If there was a band that combined the lyrics of They Might Be Giants, with the musicality of Ween, you’d have the perfect band!” you proclaim, like a teen whose just discovered alternative music.

I love you.

I look out the window.

Through the whiteness, I see Serenity slumped over a curb, scribbling in her pocket notebook.

After she took my virginity, Serenity made me a three-disc mix CD with druggy alien creatures drawn on them. In green sharpie, she had written, “Thanks for being there for me. It means a lot.”

I broke up with her in the lobby of our high school. Serenity then dropped out of school, and overdosed. She was pronounced dead, for upwards of a minute, but was miraculously revived. She returned to school only once, to collect her paintings. I brought them to her car. We sat for a spell, smoking cigarettes.

I wanted to know if she had seen anything we’re not supposed to see.

“What’s it like?” I asked her.

“Nothing. It’s like nothing.”

She is lost in a herd of Pink Elephants, their low-frequency trumpet-cries close behind.

I turn to you.

“Wanna listen to that Ween CD again?”

“What’s a Ween?” You grimace. You won’t look at me.

“That band we listened to last week! We listened to two full albums of theirs on the way to Michigan!”
“Not ringing a bell.”

“You said if you combined the lyrics of They Might Be Giants with —”

“I never said that.”

We drive in silence. Why don’t you remember fucking anything? God, I hope I don’t get like that when I’m older.

A sick feeling knots up my stomach. I’m scared to look at you. Maybe I won’t. Alas, as a son, as a poet, as a man, I must.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

Are you ignoring me? No. Worse. You don’t know I’m here. I stare into your five o’clock shadow.

It occurs to me that I may never speak to you again.

The whiteness makes its way into the car.

“Dad,” I plead.

You turn slightly. You may be acknowledging me, but you probably aren’t — just like when you withered away on your death bed. I can barely see you through the fog. I ask the same question I asked Serenity, hoping for a different answer.

“…What’s it like?”

Featured image, showing a young Jack Dunphy with his father, is by Colleen Trundy.