Lex(45)

As soon as my father’s eyes latched onto the doll that I was jiggling in my tiny hands he snatched it away. At first, I thought it was so he could get a better look at her. To admire how pretty her fluffy pink dress was.

Boy, oh boy, was I wrong.

“You wanted a fucking bitch doll?!” he seethed, red faced, jaw locked, his knuckles that were wrapped around my Barbie had turned pure white.

I didn’t respond.

“Lex, you don’t want to pee standing up and you like your mother’s lipstick and perfume. Now, you want a stupid doll!?” By this time, he was screaming right in my little four-year-old face. I could smell cigarette stench on his breath. I was already shaking and bawling so hard I couldn’t have spoken a single coherent word if I wanted to. I sniffled and sucked in the snot that wanted to run, and kept wiping my eyes repeatedly, to clear away the waterfall of salty tears.

“Lex, dolls are for girls! And no son of mine will be playing with bitch dolls!”

That was the very first day of many days to come that my earth shattered around me. First came Barbie’s head. He tore off her body and chucked it angrily across the room, with a manly roar.

“No fucking dolls, Lex.” He screamed again, yanking off both of her arms at the same time. Those he tossed into the trashcan next to his chair. I can’t remember much of what he screamed after that, because I was so devastated with a shattered heart, I couldn’t think straight. The one and only toy I had loved was being destroyed in front of my very eyes. The same day I had brought her home to live with us.

Once he was finished, all that was left was her torso. Even her dress was gone, since he’d torched it over the trashcan with his butane lighter that he pulled from his pants pocket. It was the one he normally used to light his cigarettes.

Afterward, because I was still hysterically crying, my father told me like so many parents are guilty of. “If you’re going to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.” And he did, with his black leather belt and my trembling body bent over his knee. I lost count after ten lashes on my bottom. I was only four so I couldn’t count much higher, even if I wanted to.

From that day forward, I vowed to myself, that I’d hide who I am from the world, never letting anyone see me smelling my mom’s perfume or trying on her heels. I was sneaky. I had no other choice. I was different. I knew it. I also knew no one was going to accept who I am.

After years of verbal abuse and some physical, mainly spankings and the occasional cigarette put out on my back was all I endured. If I had to calculate it, between the ages of four and seven, I was verbally abused daily. “Bitch boy,” was my father’s favorite nickname for me during those years.

I’m sure by now you are wondering where and the hell was my mother during all of this? She was getting slightly less abused right next to me. Because it was the early nineties, we lived in a small town, and my dad was a respected police officer, no one and I mean no one took my mother’s police reports seriously. He never did anything that would last long enough or warrant me having to go to the hospital. When she once tried to leave, he punched her in the eye, she went to the police and they did nothing. My father said she tripped and hit her eye on a doorknob. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Of course, I didn’t know about any of these police reports until I was a lot older and my mother showed them to me.

By the time I was seven, my mother had sort of accepted that I wasn’t quite right for a boy. Not once did she try to change me, or ask me to be something I’m not. So when I asked permission to grow my hair long she didn’t question it. Once again, I was thrilled, but as soon as it grew past my ears, my father took scissors to my head when I was sleeping, forcing me to have short hair all over again. A buzz cut to be exact, because that next morning with a bed full of black hair my father forced my mother to clean up the mess he’d made. He took me into the bathroom and shaved my head with his clippers on the second to lowest setting.

That same year, my father came home early to find me playing with my mom’s colorful heels inside her closet. That time I peed myself as he sat on top of me, on the floor right inside the closet, my face forcefully smashed into the brown carpet and beat me with the heels of a pair of bright blue stilettos until I passed out. I still have the three circle scars where he had hit me so hard it had punctured my skin. I didn’t realize how bad I had been beaten until I woke up on the cheap rose linoleum bathroom floor in my mother’s sobbing arms. As she cradled me and cried, applying antiseptic to my bruised and bloodied body.

After years of this abuse, both physical and emotional, it was normal for me. I was used to getting whipped by the belt from my father when my mom didn’t cook dinner properly. Once I was thrown into a cold shower because my father was horny and my mom refused to have sex with him. I was the outlet for him, the bad son, all because I was different. I wanted to wear frilly dresses like all the other girls, have boobs, and go through female puberty. I couldn’t help it. I felt shame and disgust with myself for years for feeling the way I do. I tried so hard to convince myself I was a boy and that I liked having a penis, even though I never really have.