Of course, she calls me on my shit of an answer. I hang my head, letting the warmth of the fire absorb into my skin for a minute while gathering the words for my response. I have never shared stories from my childhood. They aren’t pretty, for one. Two, hearing things like that makes people uncomfortable. The most important reason for me is the pity. I hate seeing the look on people’s faces when they find out the life I had. It makes me feel like that scared thirteen-year-old boy again and brings all of the shame rushing back. The last thing I want is to see that look on Jen’s face. I’ve worked my entire adult life at erasing that feeling of embarrassment, and one look from her could make it all wash back over me.
Taking a deep breath, I let the oxygen invade my lungs and hope the air will transform into courage and infiltrate my soul. Jen’s hand slides to mine which are clasped tightly in front of me and she gently begins to stroke my fingers.
“It’s okay if you don’t feel comfortable sharing with me,” she whispers. I can hear the hurt in her tone, and when I finally muster the guts to look her in the eyes, the disappointment is there, too. The sadness there makes my stomach twist into knots. Those eyes make me realize I would gladly bathe in an ocean of shame than ever make this woman feel unworthy of knowing me.
“No,” I quickly say, grabbing her hand when she begins to pull it away. “It’s just, to understand why I love music, you have to understand my past and that’s not something I’m used to sharing with people.”
She looks away from me, and I feel the loss of her intense stare. “I get it, Casen. It’s okay; it was a stupid bet anyways.”
Letting go of her hand, I reach for her smooth, rosy cheek and gently force her attention back to me. “Jen, I’m not afraid to tell you about myself,” I tell her with as much conviction as possible. “I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me after you know.” My voice tapers off with each word, but my hand remains on her cheek, my thumb rubbing delicately along her cheekbone.
“We all have a past, Casen,” she murmurs with a light smile. “I figure it’s what keeps us all on an even playing field in the present. If things haven’t worked themselves out or don’t seem fair, karma always has a way of collecting her debts in the future.”
I let her words hang in the air for a moment, allowing her simple life philosophy to sink in before I let my story spill out. “Okay,” I say with a nod. “You know I was raised by my grandmother in a trailer park in northern Colorado. You know we were poor. You don’t know how I ended up there, nor how music was what kept me from going down the same path as my parents.”
Jen sets her plate on the ground, her dinner forgotten. Henri gladly helps her clean the plate, but neither of us bothers to instruct him otherwise. We are both too immersed in the questions I’m willing to answer.
“My parents were not great people. My mom was an exotic dancer with a craving for heroin. The drugs ultimately claimed what little life she had. My dad, on the other hand, managed to keep himself clean in terms of drugs, but he was a brutally mean drunk. He used my mom as a meal ticket, even pimping her on the streets if need be to pay the bills and their addictions. My dad knew how to play guitar and he taught me when I was young. Not as a father son activity. No, he put me on the streets with my guitar to strum up any extra change I could.”
Jen’s eyes haven’t moved from mine, yet thankfully they haven’t filled with regret for me, either. She’s listening, letting my painful past therapeutically flow from me, each word healing a little piece of my brokenness.
“Whenever things got bad,” I continue, “It was the music which gave me an escape from what was going on around me. Whenever my brothers and sisters were crying, it was my music, which calmed them down. Whenever my mom didn’t bring home enough cash, it was my music on the streets, which quieted my father, the beast, saving us all from hours of misery. When you asked why music, there is no simple answer. Music isn’t a hobby or even a profession for me. It’s much more than that. It’s been my escape from the pain, safety from a damaged past, it’s who I am…it’s what I am.”
Jen breathes out heavily, mulling over her response before reacting to my answer. My throat constricts as worry overtakes me. My fear of rejection begins to take hold. But then, she scoots closer to me, so close I’m not sure where I end and she begins. “Our pasts are not who we are, they are events which have happened to us. You’re a good person and I’m proud to be sitting next to you right now. The bumpy road it took you to get here doesn’t change that.”
Relief floods my system as her petite hand moves up and down my arm, comforting me. Suddenly her hand settles on my arm and I instantly know question number two is coming and I know what it will be.
“Go ahead and ask question two,” I tell her, beating her to it. She looks to me surprised, like I wouldn’t guess what the question will be. “Go on, I know what you want to ask.”
She runs her hand up and then down my arm one last time and I close my eyes to fully enjoy the feeling of her skin on mine, even though I know what it is she’s exploring.
“Tell me about the tattoos,” she says. “I don’t need to know about the images; I want to know why you got all of them.” Her resolve is beginning to fade, as she knows the answer. She wants to hear me tell the story; make it real for her.
“I told you my dad was a mean son of a bitch. He never hit my mom; he knew if he banged her up, she couldn’t make him money. Instead, he came after us kids. I was the oldest, I could take more than my brothers and sisters, and so many times I would provoke him to come after me instead of them. He was always coming up with new ways to hurt us, but his favorite was putting his cigarettes out on me. I have scars all over my arms where he would burn me. They became constant reminders of what I came from. When I was old enough, I started getting tattoos to cover the scars. I wanted to be released from the horrors of my childhood.”
I can see she’s trying desperately to hold her emotions at bay, but even Jen isn’t cold enough to be unaffected. A single tear slides down her cheek, and I quickly wipe it away with my fingertips.
“How did you get out of there?” she asks, noticing her tears and swiftly brushing the remainder away.
“In junior high I had to start changing into athletic clothes for PE, which meant no more long-sleeve shirts every day. One of my teachers saw the fresh burns and called social services. Relatives all stepped up and we all were shipped to different people. My grandmother couldn’t handle taking care of the little ones so I went with her. I was thirteen and could pretty much take care of myself.”
“So your dad went to jail then,” she states matter-of-fact, and you would think it would be the safe assumption.
“No.”
Her eyebrows pinch together, irritation and anger spread across her face.
“My mother didn’t want to press charges and none of the kids were willing to testify. As long as the kids were no longer in the home with my father, they didn’t pursue it further.”
“That is not okay,” she insists and I agree. There were no consequences; it was like I endured it all for nothing. I just had to hope life would eventually catch up to him. It eventually did.
“He got what was coming to him, it just took a while. Mom died of an overdose about a year after we all were separated. My dad fell off the deep end after that. He got himself into some bad gambling debts, and well, he double-crossed the wrong person. He disappeared and we never heard from him again, but we all knew what probably happened.”
My eyes have drifted back to the flames. I’m not ready yet to see the look on Jen’s face after hearing my story. Then I feel her hands once again on my arm and move across one of my scars. She brings my arm to her mouth and kisses the damaged skin. The simple act makes all the fear I had been holding onto diminish. She doesn’t need to say anything. I know she accepts me, and I’ve never been more grateful.