Disrespect for Authority

I was born with a disdain for authority. I did not trust that anyone had my best interests at heart, or was smarter than myself to the extent that I should "do as they say". That would be impossible. At five years old, my mother began ordering me to "clean" my playroom. She wasn't aware enough to realize that the playroom wasn't dirty, it was recently perfected, in fact. The horses were organized by herd, the barbies were keeping watch in case the wolves should come back and threaten the herd again. I tried exposing reality to her narrow minded ideal of "clean", but she persisted, "RIGHT NOW, I WANT TO SEE THE FLOOR!" She was just wrong and so blinded by her unintelligible fury that she couldn't even hear my solid reasoning. She was a typical example of an "Authority Figure", which I had learned to be another human, no better than myself, struggling for control in their very conditional happiness. Of course conditional love for anything will lead to a very disappointing life, and though i wanted to help her adapt and find her own happiness, independent of her vision of MY playroom, she was simply beyond accepting progressive viewpoints. My sister had showed up, delighted to watch someone else succumb to her iron fist. So i stopped to her level and shouted back, "YOU DON'T OWN MY BODY!" She saw me then, just for a second, or so i thought, because the next second, my mother and sister were gasping for breath between howling laughter. I was serious! However embarrassing, it did allow me to run and hide under my bed with my kitty and NOT "clean up" my perfect toy society. 

  That set the tone for how I would deal with authority figures forever on. There was the time in 7th grade I was fervently telling my best friend about a wild dream I had during first period "math class". It was important to tell her before I forgot! It was dramatic, it was hilarious, it was IMPORTANT! But Mr. Green with his little bloody pieces of toilet paper still sticking to his face from his morning shave fails, thought that the rules of the pythagoreanm theorem ought to be more gripping. He was wrong, and to further demonstrate his lacking emotional intelligence, he took his black dry erase pen, walked over to me and drew it along the top of my scalp, as if my blonde hair now had black roots. The authority figure was an idiot, and the disrespect was mutual. In an instant, I jumped up and slapped the coke bottle glasses right off his bloody face! He grimaced showing his two sets of sharp shark teeth, and reached out in a blind rage. He found my left arm and twisted it behind my back in a painfully debilitating move. The rest of the class was equally horrified and enthralled. They knew it was coming to this. Mr. Green and I had been at war for two years now. As I went to claw his face off, the door creaked open, and in the smallest recordable fraction of time, I was sitting placidly in my seat, staring at the dry erase board, and Mr. Green spun on his heels and awkwardly faced the opening door, panting. Our principal, who adored me best of all the 78 students of Stuart School, a tiny private school of pre-kindergarten through 8th grade, stood squint eyed, surveying the room, she sniffed the air and smelled the fear and excitement, and said nothing. Mr. Green, still shaking, still blind, stumbled up to the dry erase board and continued his monotonous babbling, likely praying to his god that I remain silent. He needed this job. In my new found power, I ordered cable tv for our classroom at his expense so that we may watch MTV and VH1 at recess and lunch. The power was equal and compromises were made. I hated Mr. Green less, and we even occasionally joked after that. 

  About our principal, the fierce lioness, Lyn. I am 199% certain that wherever wrote the character of Sue Sylvester in Glee knew Lyn. Not only did they look and talk exactly the same, but they ruled with clever cruelty. Lyn liked me because she saw me rise above the rules to carve my own path, and whenever you would expect me to be in trouble for something, she commended me publicly. Once, she gave the class a Spanish Pop Quiz. It was impossible! We hadn't even learned the words and verb conjugations that were on the test yet! We were doomed to fail and no one dare speak up about it. She excused herself to the ladies room, but what she really did was pretend to go to the ladies room and sneak back in to watch us from behind a curtain that separated one room from another. Assuming she was gone for at least 3 minutes, I immediately darted to the podium and copied all the answers. I even read them aloud to help my fellow man avoid a failing grade. I sat down, and when she walked back in, grinning, she stood at her podium, lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose and said, "Suzanne gets an A+ for using all her available resources. She will win in life. The rest of you cowards failed, and if you don't fight for yourselves against a society that will try to keep you down, then down you'll stay." That was my favourite moment of life. 

  Anyways, about 5 years later, at 16, I had my first run in with the cops. I'd been dating a 20 year old, who in my defense I later married, and in my parents defense, I later divorced. My parents had found and read my diary fier the second time that year detailing my sordid relationship with this older man who was renting hotel rooms with me, teaching me how to smoke weed, picking me up from school just moments after my parents dropped me off... They thought that installing an alarm system on every door and window in their smart house/prison, would have kept me from the cruel world outside. But I brilliantly chipped off the bottom magnet atop the door that made an alert system go off, and glued it to the top magnet so that they would never scream for each other again. And so as soon as I said goodnight to my parents, i walked right out my bedroom door to the porch and ran up the hill to my boyfriend waiting in his little race ready modified ford focus.. the blue pearl. Anyhow, despite my excellent sneakiness, I couldn't help but write all my adventures in a diary, which I kept in a new secret place every week. My mom found it and called the police to report that i was being raped and forced into doing drugs by this corrupted man who happened to have a history on file with the police. At school, I was called into the principal's office. I was ready to talk my way out of anything, as usual, until I walked in to his office to find him handing tissues to my crying parents... He said somberly, "Have a seat".. my mom sobbed to my dad, "I can't even look at her". The principal held out a shoe box of little papers.. I knew what they were. 128 written notes excusing me from class. He held up each one, read it aloud and asked my parents if they had written it. They shook their heads in disbelief. I had of course written all those "Please excuse Suzanne" notes and forged my parents signatures with such accuracy, I had impressed myself. Then my mom made the mistake of announcing, "We're sending her to live with her disciplinarian aunt and uncle in Minnesota. She leaves tomorrow morning". I was sick with the idea of leaving my beloved boyfriend. "Excuse me, I have to pee so badly I can't hold it another second!" And i ran straight to my locker, put on my marilyn monroe wig, pants (which i never ever wore) and my choir polo shirt (which i also would never ever wear) and in my brilliant disguise, i walked right out the front of the school, and 5 miles later found myself at my best friend's divorce lawyers office. "Hello, I need to be emancipated quickly". His secretary stared oddly at my wig which I had partially melted when I tried curling the bangs with a hot iron. It wasn't a good look, and that's why this was such a good disguise. I knew my mom would be hunting me with police dogs as soon as they realized I hadn't really just gone pee and I wasn't coming back. I sat with the exasperated lawyer who informed me this was a much more difficult process than I had imagined. I had a job managing a "Sweet Shop" downtown, which made decent money, but not enough to hand him $1000, rent a room and prove that I cab provide for myself for 6 months.. In fact, I couldn't go back to my job now.. they would be looking for me there. There was a bunch of big sad drama with my boyfriend and I. He was being pulled over everywhere he went and interrogated by the police. He told me we should wait until im of "legal age". This infuriated me, once again the authoritarian figures were shackling me with impersonal laws that didn't address my specific situation, in which I was right and good and they were wrong and stupid. Of course now, with all my hindsight, my boyfriend, now my exhusband, was a total peice of shit and I could have saved myself a lot of trauma if I had just dated someone my own age, but I was never asked out in high school and I thought he was the only man in the world who wanted me. 

  So I hid in friends houses, touting my sob story to their very understanding parents who had always adored me. I went to San Francisco and visited my older sister in secret, who was SO MAD, "WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD!". I ended up visiting my best friends house a couple weeks later, thinking things had probably blown over by now. It wasn't so, and after a steamy reunion with my boyfriend in his car, and a promise to be together forever, I slept at my best friend's house. We woke to a sturdy knock at the door. Her mom yelled out, "Get out here right now, the police are here! I can't be having this chaos here right now!" She had a foster child and was already in trouble for letting the mom, who happened to be her estranged drug addicted half sister, see the baby. So I scrambled under my best friends bed. It wasn't original, I know, but my best friend is a hoarder and there are no other places for hiding. Two sets of heavy footsteps lumbered down the long meandering hallway. My heart was beating in my throat. I had to be absolutely silent.. They entered the bedroom, which was tiny.. I saw the shiny black shoes face me. Then he dropped a knee and a hand reached under the bed, grabbed my ankle and dragged me out into the shameful light. It was a very stupid, childish hiding place. The men seemed irritated, no doubt they have been dealing with my mother.. They even hand cuffed me! A simple run away! They led me to their car and put me in the back, where I discovered one of my proudest talents! I can slide my thumb joint and thumb over to the center of my palm and squeeze the rest if my very slender hand around it and make my hand the exact same width as my wrist. I was free of my shackles! I went to open the door and jump out at a red light, and then.. there was no door handle... I was still trapped, and now they would know I could get out of cuffs.. They had been angrily lecturing me this whole time about how im headed down a dangerous path and some other shitty stuff, and I started to sob. "You have to take me to a half way house! My listeners are abusing me!" Legally, they had to. And they did. And it was a mistake. I was actually a really good girl, and the kids at the half way house, not so much. And then I found out that staying at the half way house included mandatory therapy with my parents. All I really care to remember from that time was my mom saying I could never see my boyfriend again, and me proudly replying, "I will run away every day for the rest of my life to be with him! You can send me to Antartica and I will find my way to him! And for all your efforts in keeping us apart, you will NEVER meet your grandchildren!" And that was it, I had won. They gave up. I continued seeing my boyfriend with a curfew of 9pm. I wasn't pleasant with my parents afterward, things were awkward and spiteful. One day, a month or so later, my father picked me up from high school with a car stuffed with garbage bags. He had sunglasses on but was clearly crying beneath. "What's all this?" I asked. "It's your things, you're going to live with your grandparents.." I was shocked, "Why?" I asked. "Your mother thinks your trying to poison her." I definitely wasn't trying to poison her, nor did I know anything about poison. However, I believe it wad this moment that later led me to attempt poisoning my husband. Which is when I found out he was lying about his shellfish allergy too!!!We were silent the whole car ride. My grandparents weren't home. I was just dropped there in a sea of garbage bags. They hadn't even asked my grandparents, who were very surprised and feigned delight to have to me stay with them. However uncomfortable, I am grateful for that time I got live with my beloved grandma. Of course they went on a 3 month vacation a few months later, and I was left with my aunt and uncle who kept imposing more restrictions on my allowable boyfriend time. They told me I was free to leave, and I did. I bought myself a $600 Toyota Tercel off craigslist, and drove up to my best friend's dad's house where I lived in a dilapidated wood shack house with his prostitutes (I was not one, and he never tried anything with me). They girls taught me some interesting things and had a diet pole in the living room, the floor of which had worn away so that you could peak through ther cracks to the hillside beneath. One of ther girls, Earl wad helping with legal fees to win back her daughter. Her story was hard to follow, but her pimp had been shot and killed at a hotel by "someone" and for this, her daughter wad taken away and put in the foster system. She was a devoted mother who lived nothing more than her daughter. This might surprise some of the male readers but many of the strippers and "sex workers" I met were mothers. Nice, normal women you wouldn't expect to be in this profession. Some even had boyfriends and husbands, and they worked secretly to support their families with the fastest way to make big money. Anyhow, I cleaned his house and gave him back and foot massages in trade for meals (meat and eggs) and rent. He even let me borrow his fancy BMW to take to school one day. As i was leaving school to go to an interview for a better job, a dumb bitch was zooming through ther parking lot in her burgundy Lexus and hit me as I was slowly, carefully backing out. She rolled down her window and shouted, "Sorry, you're fine!" And sped away. Now my best fiends dad was not the sort of man you want to piss off. He had enough artillery to start a third world war, grew weed for Snoop Dog while it was still illegal, and had a pistol under every pillow, in every drawer, under every counter top, under every couch cushion, I even found one in ther piano bench. The IRS was afraid of him and had stopped coming around, no one fucked with Earl. He ate straight meat every meal and had quite the temper. So I got out of the car, surveyed the damage, went to my interview which was at the disgusting "Adel's Restaurant". It was given to the owners pedophilic son whom a friend had an unfortunate sexual experience with at 13 and his being in his early 20s. He was detestable, but I knew he liked to hire pretty young girls so he could "be their boss". I thought it would be fun to fuck up his business and destroy him. So after the interview I went to Safeway, got some silver nail polish and started painting the bright red scrapes... It wasn't working.. I left the car at Earl's compound, packed my things and took my choking little Toyota Tercel to my boyfriend's house. It died right there in his driveway, and I pleaded with his parents, who liked me very much, to please let me live with them. 

Happily Ever... kidding! It never ends..

I will tell you my funny adult run ins with the cops tomorrow.. they are particularly hilarious, and it is my deepest hope that they all had body cams and someday these incidents are posted online for us all to laugh at.