What happened in Gallup, New Mexico

Warning: This post contains content related to child sexual abuse.

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”― Rumi

The images arrive in my mind unbidden. Snapshots of the shadowy laundry room. Not just visuals. Other senses offer up memories too. The warmth of the dryers and the desert heat of a New Mexico summer gnawing at the building. The dull roar of the dryers harmonizing like a machine choir. I can even smell the fresh scent of detergent and clean clothing lingering in the air. Or maybe that’s my brain filling in the gaps.

Brains are tricky motherfuckers. Who’s to say what’s a memory, what’s a memory of a memory, and what artistic license my brain has taken in the four decades of life that have intervened since a 6-year-old me wandered around those rows of rusty washers and dryers in the laundry room of a dusty apartment complex in New Mexico?

After my parents separated when I was 5, Dad loaded up his Bronco and left our home in Orem, Utah for a job strip mining for coal in Gallup, New Mexico. Much later, as an adult trying to explain to him how much it hurt that he left the state, how little he was involved in our lives, and how bad it felt to grow up without a dad, he began to cry and, as usual, talked and talked and talked and talked and talked about how much harder it was for him which was an obvious segue into what a cunt Mom was for wrecking the family.

I suspect that, at nearly seventy, he’s still polishing that particular monologue, an old favorite of his. Divorced since the early eighties, reliably blaming Mom for the entire thing, fingers pointed outward at everyone else, never once questioning his role in the demise of his marriage and family. A popular divorce dynamic with which I am, unfortunately, intimately familiar.

Good talk, Dad. Cool cool cool. Thanks for listening.

Among other things, he told me the day he drove his beloved 1979 blue & white Bronco away from our house for good my older brother and I chased it down the street screaming for him to come back.

I have no memory of this. I have very few childhood memories of Dad in Utah. I seem to have forgotten so much of what happened during my childhood. It was during our first trip to New Mexico that I cut off as much of my long hair as I could see in the mirror, my mom tells me. Because I couldn’t reach the back of my head with the scissors, I returned to her rocking a mullet rivaling Billy Ray Cyrus’ circa Achy Breaky Heart. Zero memory of this but the proof is in the pictures.

It was a chaotic, scary time. I wet the bed until I was 8 and felt unsafe, helpless, and lonely. There wasn’t a reliable adult in my life. They all screamed, they all cried, they were always gone. Talking or writing about it at all causes my body to tense up as dread blooms in my chest and stomach.

After my parents’ incredibly acrimonious divorce, for a few weeks each summer, my brothers and I were shuttled to the shitty apartment Dad moved to in Gallup. It was a large complex, maybe nine buildings in all surrounded by a stretch of parking lot.

Dad lived in apartment E2. First floor, second door from left. I remember the sound the banged-up aluminum storm door made when it slammed shut. I remember a sparsely furnished living room, a dingy kitchen, a small bathroom, and two back bedrooms. I remember fighting over who got to eat their cereal from the blue bowl while we watched Scooby Doo, GI Joe, He-man, Transformers, Jonny Quest, and my favorite; Inspector Gadget.

The cartoon was named after the bumbling cop, Inspector Gadget, but his niece, Penny, was the real hero and, I realize belatedly, my first savory taste of a feminist icon. The kind of smart, tenacious girl I aspired to be. There weren’t many options. Velma and Daphne were ok but Shaggy and Scooby stole that show. She-Ra and Jem wouldn’t be around for a few more years.

I secretly fantasized about being precocious Penny who saved her dumbass uncle from himself over and over again. Penny was no sidekick, she was evil Dr. Claw’s true nemesis, routinely solving tough cases and saving Metro City and Gadget from his own stupidity, his staggering ineptitude and dismissal of Penny’s obvious skills were an eerie precursor to white, male, cop stereotypes of the 21st century.

Memories from childhood are strange. They appear randomly as flashes in your mind, no context. Fragmented puzzle pieces that don’t seem to fit together with anything else in your head. They’re there throughout your life, these childhood thoughts, memories, and perspectives and you don’t think too much about them or try to form them into a narrative until much later, if ever.

Cartoons

Dad crying. Scary crying. Sobbing

Punching a wall

Dad hates mom

Sidewalk

Laundry room

Hot, noisy

Hairy man legs

White, corduroy shorts

Bathtub

The man

Tom?

Mostly, I remember cartoon watching and lots of cereal eating. I don’t remember Dad being around so much which I didn’t think to question until this year. I remember playing beneath a tree in the dusty courtyard of the apartment, feeling drops splatter on my head and looking up for the dark skies releasing rain only to realize it was my older brother high up in a tree releasing his bladder. Intentionally. On my head.

Classic Brandon shit.

He used to sit on my chest, pin my arms to the floor with his knees, plug my nose until I was forced to open my mouth to gasp for air, and then spit loogies onto my tongue while I retched and gagged. Another time he choked me until I nearly lost consciousness and peed on myself.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that I began trying to finish the Gallup, New Mexico puzzle, assembling all the pieces and trying to form a picture, a coherent narrative, of my time there.

It started when I was jogging, low-key training for a 5K I had spontaneously signed up to run after years of not running. Some leftover COVID, renewed-lease-on-life energy, or something? Who knows? You know how it goes; have one too many beers while your kids are streaming some Disney movie where Imagine Dragons is belting out “Believer” or “Thunder.” You’re all pumped, swearing off alcohol, ready to run ten miles a day and making lists of workout routines. Suddenly it’s 1 am and you’ve signed up for a local 5k you won’t remember until you wake up the next morning and see the confirmation receipt email. And you haven’t run a full mile without stopping since high school.

So I was jogging when a thought randomly popped into my head and my body kind of shut down, causing me to come to a complete stop at the side of the road. I was gasping for air, my throat constricting, bent at the waist, hands braced on my knees as I sobbed uncontrollably.

Thing is, I wasn’t sure why…

The thought was a random memory of the laundry room in New Mexico.

Know when you’re swimming on a so-so day and you’re already cold-ish when a large, dark cloud moves in front of the sun causing you to shiver, look up and become hyper-aware of your surroundings and how your body is responding? Like, oof, this is cold, come back out, sun! It was like that but way worse.

An intense, terrible feeling of fear and shame washed over my body. I sobbed so hard I retched. The puzzle-piece thoughts have made random appearances in my brain all these years but didn’t mean much to me other than memory fragments from those two strange summers spent in Gallup, New Mexico when I was 6 and 7 years old.

This next part has been difficult to articulate because I have just started vocalizing it to myself and my therapist even though I have been aware of it since always. Throughout my life, from around the same time I visited New Mexico, I now realize, I began feeling uncomfortable about my naked body. Dirty. Violated. Ashamed and disgusted by my nakedness, especially my “private parts,” as I thought of them. Even typing these words makes my guts hurt, my chest ache, and my throat tighten.

It happened a lot in the bathtub. I would look down and see my naked parts and feel uncomfortable, at best. Often it would be a kind of vague disgust that moved through my awareness. The worst moments would cause me to dissociate from my body in shame. I would look away from my nudity and disconnect my brain. That’s the best way I can describe this fairly regular occurrence. Like experiencing momentary vertigo at the edge of a cliff, the feeling wouldn’t last long. It would quickly pass and I’d move on with my day, my life.

Later, as an adult, I attributed the black, dirty feeling to the Mormon shame that permeated my childhood. Now that I’m studying the timeline more clearly I think the religious shame came later, when I hit puberty. This specific disgust with my naked body started happening much earlier. To be clear, this was not disgust over the physical appearance of my body, it was extreme discomfort over the fact that my nudity existed, that my nakedness was there, forcing me to acknowledge it.

It still happens not infrequently.

Over the past few years, the laundry room, bathtubs, and this man increasingly entered my thoughts. Who was this guy? His name was Tom, that much I remember. Tom was Dad’s friend? Neighbor? I remember him popping into Dad’s apartment all the time. What I didn’t understand was exactly who he was and why Tom is more prominent than Dad in my memories. But I let it go. Let it ebb from the forefront of my mind like water disappearing down a drain. The water goes somewhere, you just don’t know where.

Then came the Michael Jackson documentary, “Leaving Neverland.” It was disturbing for everyone, obviously, but I could not function normally for weeks after watching it. I tried to talk about it in therapy and couldn’t understand why I was reacting so dramatically. I knew the facts of the documentary before watching it and had avoided it for years because I simply could not bring myself to do it. The idea of watching that particular content scared me.

For some reason, Cory and I put it on that day and it unequivocally obliterated me. I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t work, my esophagus was a lead pipe, my chest felt as if it was caving in, I could barely swallow, and I constantly felt like I would burst into tears. Also, I was angry. Enraged.

I’ve never asked anyone about Tom. I am estranged from my dad but after the weird, specific memories kept surfacing and Gallup continued to be an unresolved topic of conversation during therapy I decided to ask my older brother what he remembered about Tom and our time at our dad’s apartment in New Mexico. He’s three years older than me, 9 and 10 at the time, so his memory is probably more reliable than mine.

I was terrified to ask. Scared of him wanting to know why I cared about Tom from New Mexico forty years later, afraid he would minimize my feelings. But my mom couldn’t help. I asked her if she knew anything about our time in New Mexico and she said it was such a difficult time for her that she barely remembers us going.

The first text exchange with my brother happened a few months ago and revealed why at 9, 6, and 4 we were left home alone all day. Dad had to work early in the morning so he asked his upstairs neighbor, Tom, to keep an eye on us, my brother explained. We were to mostly stay in the apartment and if we went outside we could not leave the courtyard area.

“Tom was single, in his thirties,” my brother texted.

“Was he a nice guy?” I asked. Did you like him?”

I sat in my minivan, parked in my driveway, unable to get out and walk into my house. Sweating, heart pounding, I waited for his reply. My brother doesn’t have an iPhone so there were no dots to indicate a response was forthcoming.

“He was a pervert,” a neon green block of text soon revealed.

“What makes you say that?” I texted back, my stomach flip-flopping.

“I first heard the word pussy from him. I was nine. He was trying to convince Dad to go out with him to ‘score some pussy’ and asked me if I knew what a pussy was and was touching his dick in a creepy way. I think he was arrested for embezzling money from the bank where he worked.”

“Why was he living in that complex, do you know? Like, what was his story?”

“Divorced. Wife left him, took their kid and moved across the country. Changed the kid’s last name to hers even, I think.”

Well fuck.

Being considered a pervert by a 9-year-old is no smoking gun for molestation, of course. But it ain’t great.

I remember the concrete sidewalk that led from my dad’s apartment and joined the main sidewalk that ran in front of the building. Come out of Dad’s apartment, hang a right, walk along the sidewalk for a few seconds then make another right and you’re walking along the side of the apartment building. The laundry room was tucked back there surrounded by trees and bushes. I remember it being shady, shadowy, and almost dark inside.

Flashes of hairy, muscle-y man legs.

Warm-to-the-touch dryers rumbling.

White-colored corduroy shorts, eighties-style, so they were very short.

Thigh muscle.

Black leg hair. He had a lot of facial hair, too. A beard.

I have a memory of him telling us (me?) we needed to take a bath and that we should cram the bar of soap in our butt cracks to get it really clean. I also feel like I took a bath in his tub at one point. It could’ve been in my dad’s apartment but I think it was Tom’s. I think he was standing over me? Was my little brother there?

I just can’t remember a coherent narrative, only flashes of images like film developed into a packet of photos from the same era. Overexposed, blurry, shadowy.

None of this means much forty years later. Or it means everything? I don’t talk to my dad, haven’t since he expressed his anger over my surname change, and I don’t want to get into a conversation with him about Tom or why he left us home alone all day with occasional check-ins from the pervy upstairs neighbor he barely knew. It almost certainly won’t go well. I will, as usual, have to lock down my emotions while I manage his fragile personality, become his therapist and ultimately absolve him of any parental responsibility so he stops crying and/or blaming me for his tears.

Each time I try to bring up New Mexico in therapy, I can’t speak about it. My chest tightens, heavy dread descends, my body becomes lethargic and I begin to cry. I’ll be sobbing and looking at my therapist shaking my head in disbelief saying, “I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know why this is happening. Why am I crying?”

I gaslight myself, apologizing for being emotional and dramatic. I hate crying in therapy. Hate feeling vulnerable. These emotions are unsafe to me. And fuck. Is there anything more cliché than crying about your childhood in your therapist’s office?

“Your body knows,” my therapist tells me. There is a reason the laundry room is stuck in my memory, he says. A reason that forty years later those stupid hairy legs and white, wide-ribbed corduroy shorts take up huge chunks of real estate in my mind.

Maybe my body knows but it seems like my brain will never know what happened. Maybe, like one of those massive Jigsaw puzzles that sit, unfinished, on someone’s dining room table for months, I’ll never put all the pieces together.

Sometimes I sit down at the table and focus on snapping two, three, or ten pieces together. Other times the puzzle languishes untouched for months because memory is not really a thing you can force, is it? The more you try the harder it gets and I don’t even really feel like memory is reliable. Like I said, brains are tricky motherfuckers. And maybe there’s nothing to really remember? Or are enough pieces in place now to understand that forty years later I’m not remembering the laundry room and Tom’s white corduroys for nothing?

My therapist says knowing what actually happened to me, the specifics of what was done isn’t as important as awareness of the very real trauma I’m experiencing now. He urges me to stop gaslighting myself, have self-compassion, and be kind as I work to heal myself.

Some days I feel rage over not knowing if something was done to me, to that innocent, confused 6-year-old girl struggling for attention in the wake of her parents’ terrible divorce. On other days I hope I never remember. And really, my therapist is right: What is to be done about it now? Traumatic memories are often repressed because of their painful content. If something did happen, does recovering the memories matter? Would it help or make it worse? I don’t want to languish in a victim mentality. The past is done. Gone. I cannot change it. I can only control who I am now and I am working so hard to better myself.

Still, all of these unconnected puzzle pieces scattered around my mind continue to torture me. No specific memories, just a gripping horror, a shadowy dread that overtakes my mind and body when I least expect it.

And I think of her: 6-year-old me. What do I owe her? She makes me cry. I want to sweep her up into my arms, hold her close, and tell her I love her, and that I am here for her.

Look at us now, I want to tell her. I am a proud mother and I share my life with an incredible person, the great love of my life, who understands that sometimes sex triggers responses I don’t fully understand including embarrassment, shame, disgust, and dissociation. Above all, he listens and makes me feel safe.

Sexual abuse may trigger strong negative emotions linked to sexual desire or behavior for trauma survivors. When something is scary, it triggers the brain’s fight/flight/freeze response — specifically the amygdala, which we can’t consciously control to just be different – we have to feel differently.

As we know from research, neurons that fire together wire together. This means fear and negative feelings can become triggered, automatically “hard-wiring” to sexual responses because of past abuse. This is why trauma survivors often experience disgust, pain, discomfort during sex, or terrifying flashbacks from the past — even when they are safe with someone they choose in the present day. - PSYCHALIVE

I think of myself as a child and look at my four beautiful, innocent children who are now years older than I was during that terrifying, painful time in my life. As an adult, I can clearly see how pure and naive all kids are and through my children I begin to understand myself at that age and develop a compassion I have previously been unable to summon.

I carry such self-hatred, always have. But now, when I look at my sweet, baby Charlie - or think of any of my kids when they were 6 and 7 - and realize that’s how young I was when I began to hate myself, I can understand that I was innocent, goddammit. For the first time, I can feel such love and compassion for that sad girl and the kickass woman she has become.

That poor little girl.

You will be ok because I am ok. You’re not alone. I got you. You have me.

What a scary childhood you had. I’m so sorry it happened that way. You’re safe now. It’s going to be ok. You’re not alone. I’m here waiting for you. It’s ok now. It wasn’t your fault. You’re a good person.

You. Are. A. Good. Person.

I love you.

Artist: Waxahatchee. Song: St. Cloud.

Reading/Watching/Listening:

John Early Now More Than Ever (Max)

The Bear Season 2 (Hulu)