Please Don't Look Away
The rock n roll man with the candy is my daddy. An essay about family secrets, the shadow side of the punk scene and life after sex addiction/trauma.
With a black, chin-length shag, an anti-establishment ethos, and a youth spent riding around with acid-dealing biker gangs, Daddy was cooler than cool. At the carefree age of six, he introduced me to The Doors, The Stones, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. And just like the Velvet Underground song about little Jenny, I started dancing to that “fine, fine music,” and my life “was saved by rock n roll.”
I didn’t know this when I was a kid, but Dad was high on morphine for most of those piggyback riding and dancing around to rock n roll weekends I would spend with him. His downstairs neighbor, Marco, a New Age keyboard player, was permanently disabled after a car wreck left him with a metal pole in his back. Since Marco couldn’t work a normal job, he was always ending up in ridiculous situations in which copious amounts of illicit drugs, that he was meant to keep safe for a big-time drug lord, would end up in his and my father’s noses. I would hang out with Dad and Marco, totally oblivious of why they were so childlike and goofy. Marco and Daddy would be high as a kite dancing around to one of Marco’s Keyboard melodies while Marco’s Daughter, Julie, and me roller-skated around on the carpet sucking on Tootsie Roll pops.
When I was ten, my mother bought a trailer with her small inheritance from my grandmother and moved herself, my stepfather James, and my new baby sister to Albuquerque. Years later, she would confess that this was one of the many geographic relocations triggered by my stepfather, James, threatening to run away with their daughter if my mom tried to leave him. Even though my dad followed us to New Mexico, our carefree days skipping under sunny California palms and hiking in the Redwood forest were over.
Years later, I would drunkenly burst into tears on my father’s living room floor and demand to know why he never did anything about James abusing me. For surely, he knew what was going on in my home. But he never spoke up, not once. Instead, he would drop by on the weekends to buy Ritalin off James before taking me to a clothing-optional hot spring with his stoner friend Ralph. Ralph was fat and balding with liver spots and a long gray ponytail. One day, my father left me alone with Ralph in one of the soaking pools. Sitting across from me naked, he told me how natural naked bodies were and how good the water felt on his penis. I never felt so ashamed of my body as I did after that day with Ralph.
At thirteen, after running away from home and having my virginity stolen by my first punk rock crush, we moved to South Bend, Indiana. I was getting into punk and shaving my head and wearing weird-ass thrift store clothes. My history teacher, Lydia, who had been to India and was a cool, Eastern-thinking hippie chick, took notice of my outsider attitude and invited me over to her house one night to smoke pot and talk about how grown-up and cool I was for my age. Later, when her Indian Engineer husband got home from his high-profile job, she coerced me into going for a drive with him in his new BMW. He slowed down the car next to a rare patch of woods popping up in a black mass against the flat landscape of farmland. When I wouldn’t get out of the car and go into the forest with him, he took me back to the house where my teacher proceeded to drug me with wine coolers while he gave me a “culturally normal in India” erotic massage.
I never told my mom. I acted out instead, snuck out of my room at night, went off with older guys, did drugs, got kicked out of middle school for smoking cigarettes in the girls’ bathroom. Mom didn’t know what to do, so she sent me back to Albuquerque to live with my father.
After six months at my dad’s, my first boyfriend, Sid, who had introduced me to Crass and Anti-Flag before dumping me and turning into a Nazi punk, knifed me in an alley. A month after the assault, which I never reported, I found him and his idiot friend Todd messing around in front of my apartment with a bottle of Mace. Todd accidentally sprayed Sid in the face. Being the person I was then, who had no idea I had any power, I let a screaming and red-faced Sid inside and gave him some milk to wash his eyes with. After he recovered, I discovered the real reason they had come to my house when Todd took out a Sharpie and started writing Hail, Hitler, and drawing swastikas all over the walls of my dad’s apartment. Had I told them I was part Ashkenazi? Did he think my dad was Mexican? (Dad was often mistaken for Native American or Mexican.) I do not know, but when my dad got home, he was so angry that he called my mom and told her he wanted me out. In those six months under his care, I had been stalked by a twenty-five-year-old airport security guard, raped by an older punk rocker creeping around my high school, and solicited for nude photos by a man my father’s age. Of course, I never told anyone. I was groomed to think this kind of shit was normal. Even in the nineties, with milk box kids served with our morning cartoons, everyone ignored it.
My dad was home once when the airport security guard came by looking for me. He did what a father should do and threatened to call the police if the guy ever came back. But it was a different story when I brought my teenage girlfriends over. Dad would often make sexual remarks after they left. I was always getting fucked up messages like don’t rape my daughter, but damn, underage girls are okay to objectify if they’re not mine.
It was Christmas Eve when I was sent back to live with my mom and my clinically psychotic stepfather. I was still talking to my Nazi ex-boyfriend; I have no idea why. He told me rumors were going around at school that I was pregnant by him and some other such nonsense that I had stolen some beer on the night he knifed me. Because of this, when I came back to town, his new girlfriend was going to beat me up. I hung up the phone, took a bottle of pills from the bathroom, put in a DVD I had rented about Charlie Manson and watched the underage girls that Charlie had prostituted to famous rockers, stand on trial for murder, as I drifted off into a fifty-headache-pill sleep.
In the mental hospital I was sent after my failed suicide attempt, the doctor took my sexual history down without a second thought. You are severely depressed, you are a drug addict, you are damaged. That’s the only diagnosis I got. Talk about blaming the victim!
I didn’t talk to my father about those six months I lived with him till I was thirty-five years old and making amends in Alcoholics Anonymous. I called to apologize for the times he had tried to have a relationship with me, and I would either hang up on him or completely ignore his calls. I even apologized for how I acted when I was living with him at fourteen.
When I finished my amends, he said, “ It’s okay, you were mentally ill, so don’t worry about it.” And then he hung up. I was stunned. I was expecting to feel better, not be reminded for the 100th time that I was damaged goods.
A moment later, the phone rang again. It was my father calling me back. “I’m sorry. I should be the one apologizing, not you. The reason you are a sex addict is because of me. I was naked around you, and this is my fault.”
That was the first and only time my father has ever apologized to me for anything that happened to me as a kid because of his neglect and abuse. In fact, that was the only time any of my perpetrators ever said they were sorry for sexually objectifying me.
It would take several more years before I learned the term “emotional incest” or knew why I felt so disgusted as a teenager for the way my father started looking at me when I turned fourteen, like an object and not his little girl who loved him more than life itself. When I started to develop into a woman, I disappeared as a person to him. He didn’t care about my interests or needs anymore, and neither did any of the other men and boys who would be a constant presence in my life at the punk shows, parties, bus stops, and shit jobs I would find myself in after leaving home at seventeen.
The only notice or value I was given was in my looks and my ability to pleasure men who were an average of ten years older than me. I don’t believe I would have become a stripper, porn model, or sex addict had I not been groomed in the way I was by my father and the men my mother brought home to raise me. For a long time, I used my resentment toward my parents to fuel my alcoholism, but when I got sober and went into recovery, I had to look at why they were the way they were so that I could get better.
My mother was sexually abused by her father. My dad was brutally beaten by a father who never spoke a word to him growing up. And because they remained in active addiction for much of their lives, they never knew how to raise me. They were OG hippies, and I tried to rebel against their rape culture disguised as “free love,” with my anarcho-punk-anti-everything lifestyle. At the end of the day, I had to look deep within myself to see that Rape Culture infiltrates and poisons every aspect of society, no matter how counterculture or free.
I don’t have all the answers. But what I do know is that what we keep in the shadows, festers and grows like a cancer, hurting the vulnerable and innocent the most.
So, who is ready to start talking about this? I’m ready to listen. Are you?
I’m currently looking to interview men on their experience with rape culture within the punk scene and other music subcultures. If you would like to be apart of this project please email me: borderlanddeliaann@gmail.com
Like what you read? Check these out from my Punk Rock Sex Addiction memoir: Here and Here
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Peace, Love, and Anarchy, your pal,
Border Land Delia-Ann
You are on fire!!🔥💋
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