Trigger warning: This is a newsletter about my Near-Death Experience in 2015, after I tried to end my own life. It discusses domestic violence, child abuse and suicide. It’s also funny and ultimately healing and inspirational. I just want to make sure you feel safe here and can choose to look away if these themes might trigger your own trauma and pain. Much love, A.
You can read the prologue and Chapter 1 by clicking here.
The Exit Wound
My parents divorced when I was eleven.
My mother took off to become a high-paid escort—the kind who got flown to Vegas to entertain businessmen. She thought I didn’t know. She lived in a garage. Not a converted garage. Someone’s garage. I stayed there with her sometimes because the courts said I had to. She waited till she thought I was asleep, and left into the night, returning at dawn with stacks of cash. For Christmas when I was eleven, she got me a short, sleazy fur coat, patchy and calico, and fancy tacky jewelry in my birthstone. I was a vegetarian, an honor’s student. I loved animals. The jewelry was for someone 20 years older than me.
When I asked her how she could afford such inappropriate yet expensive things, she frowned. When I asked if it was because she was a “slut,” she slapped me. Then she composed herself and said:
“It’s all men want. They might as well pay for it.”
I still don’t understand why she slapped me, if I was right.
She didn’t like having me around. Said I cramped her style. So I stayed with my father—who made it clear that I was nothing but an emotional stand-in for the woman who’d humiliated him. I was invisible unless I was comforting my dad by telling him how great he was.
He didn’t hit me—not yet—but he seethed. He sulked. He stomped around the wooden floors of his house in clogs. Yes, he wore clogs. Men could do that in the early 80s, and it made him appear to be taller than he was. And yes, that house was his. Not ours. Certainly not mine. He made that very clear. I could live there, but only if I “behaved.” Most of the time, it barely registered with him that I existed at all.
He forgot my twelfth birthday. It was the first time in my life no one remembered I’d been born. I woke up alone, because he often slept later than I did; as a college professor his hours were odd. I got myself ready for school. Sat through the entire day wondering if anyone would care if I died. I went home crying. He asked me why I was making annoying sounds.
When I reminded him it was my birthday and he hadn’t said anything, he did not apologize. He got angry at me. He didn’t like being criticized, especially by a child. He stormed off to Walgreens, bought a clearance mug that said “Lisa” on it, stuffed a pair of socks inside, and slammed it on the table in front of me.
“Happy now?” he said.
My name is not Lisa, obviously. But I guess to him it was close enough. What’s an extra A when you hate your own kid, after all.
And no. I wasn’t happy. I was breaking. I’d never felt more alone and invisible in my life.
The following five years with my dad were a masterclass in conditional affection. I cooked dinner for him and whatever girlfriend-of-the-month happened to be sitting at our table. I was a kid, but I learned to time the pasta right, set the table like it mattered, smile like I wasn’t starving for something no one was offering. I got straight As. Got elected band president, class president, lettered in sports, got a part-time job. I soared at everything I tried. I thought maybe if I was impressive enough, he’d see me. The maybe-moms would see me. Maybe he’d stop glaring at me like I was a reminder of what she’d done.
Maybe if I was perfect, someone would finally love me.
But he never saw me.
And they never saw me either, the women he brought home—because he picked broken ones. The healthy ones ran.
One night, my mom called from New Orleans. I was sixteen by then. She’d run away from Albuquerque after her pimp tried to drown her in a toilet. He’d been hunting all over Albuquerque for her, shooting up houses, including the wall of my dad’s house. She apologized for being a bad mom and said she was leaving sex work to be a secretary. She was going to get her life together and she wanted me with her. She asked if I’d move to New Orleans and live with her. She called me Lisi, her nickname for me.
I said yes.
I didn’t want a second chance with her.
I wanted a first chance to get away from my brutal dad.
At first, it felt like maybe I’d made the right decision. The city was wild and warm and alive in a way Albuquerque never was. I became the first student to attend the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in both the Creative Writing and Jazz Performance programs. (I played sax.)
But within months, my mother had moved in with a neo-Nazi named Lamar who hated that she had a Hispanic kid. It became pretty clear she’d invited me to live with her because it impelled my dad to pay child support. I was left alone in a crumbling one-bedroom tenement with roaches for roommates, taking care of my mom’s dog that always had diarrhea, teaching myself how to survive off saltines and silence and whatever money I could earn as a fry cook at a restaurant down the block. Even though my mom was never home, she still kept the bedroom and made me sleep on a single used twin mattress on the floor of the living room. The only other thing in that room was a broken recliner and an old television that needed pliers to change the channels.
And still, I got the best grades. I found a job. I dressed myself like a kid who came from a home with normal parents who cared about her.
That’s when it happened.
My private saxophone teacher. Married. Thirty-four. Realized I was alone. And confused. Should have told the state, or the police. Instead, he saw his chance. Told me I was pretty, “but not in the normal way. Exotic.” Starved for attention, I thought that was a compliment. He took me to a hotel. Told me I mattered. I am lucky to be alive.
Years later, when I was in graduate school at Columbia, I’d run into this man again in a Manhattan gym. I worked there, teaching hip hop dance classes. I’d risen to the top of the dance fitness industry in New York, still motivated to be the best so maybe I’d be worth loving. He was old by then, 41. He grinned like we were old friends. I yelled as loud as I could that he was a pedophile who deserved to rot in prison. His name is Paul McGinley and he raped a child. He once played saxophone with the Buddy Rich Big Band, and taught saxophone at Loyola University, even to high school students. I will not protect him here or anywhere.
When child services finally stepped in back then, after my creative writing teacher, Tom Whalen, actually did call the state after reading about my life in our class journal, they gave me a choice: foster care or my dad.
My mother, they said, was unfit—if stunningly beautiful. No one who’s ever met my mom didn’t gasp or comment on it, the symmetry and grace of her appearance.
They shipped me back to my dad like a misdelivered package. He found out about what had happened in New Orleans by snooping through my drawers and reading letters Paul wrote me. My father didn’t ask if I was okay. He didn’t take me to a doctor. He didn’t hug me.
He called me a whore instead. He flew into a slobbering, red-faced rage.
Then he beat me up, stuffed all my belongings into a trash bag. I called the police because I believed he was going to kill me. He wrapped the phone cord around my neck and pulled it out of the wall jack. He threw me out of the house.
When the police arrived to find me bleeding and sobbing on the front porch, the officer looked at me and my tears and bruises, looked at my dad still holding the cord he’d tried to strangle me with, and asked me:
“What did you do to piss him off?”
That night, I moved in with my best friend’s family in their nice suburban ranch home with the pool in the backyard and the new cars in the garage. Conservative Christians. Strict, but kind. The first night in their beautiful guest bedroom on the most comfortable bed I’d ever felt, was the first time I seriously considered ending my life. I thought about the most painless ways to do it. The cleanest, neatest ways. I didn’t want whoever found me to be traumatized by the scene. In the end, I settled on poison.
The family I was staying with thought God was the answer to me being a “troubled girl.” But I’d been raised atheist, and I had no interest in God. If He existed, why did he give them love and money and stability and give me all the opposite of that?
They sent me to therapy instead, as part of their plan to help me and my father make peace with one another. It was his idea, actually. They wanted him to take me back. They didn’t want me around, either. And he refused, unless I was repaired from my whoremongering. He thought a therapist would fix what was wrong with me.
The therapist, a woman, listened to him tell her this. She didn’t flinch. She asked to meet with me without him in the room next time. Then she told me the truth I had never even considered, one I could hardly believe.
“It’s not you, Alisa,” she said. “You don’t deserve any of this. Your father has narcissistic personality disorder. He will never be well. Your mother is a disaster. She will never be well. And as far as I can tell, you—you are the only sane one in the family. I can’t believe you’ve done as well as you have.”
“All I did was the opposite of them,” I said.
She smiled. “I can see that. And I’m here to tell you this: If you want to live—really live—you need to become an emancipated minor and get out as soon as you can.”
So I did.
Night school. Summer school.
And at seventeen, I bought a one-way plane ticket with money I’d saved from part-time jobs. I packed a single suitcase, my tenor saxophone, and boarded a flight to Boston—alone—to study jazz performance at Berklee College of Music.
I had no parents. Only survival. No safety net. Only jazz.
Somewhere along the way, I’d discovered John Coltrane. Africa Brass, the most furious, beautiful album ever recorded. I listened to it the way other people listen to hymns.
And I followed Coltrane’s voice, all the way out of hell.
Did you like what you’ve read so far? Please subscribe to make sure you get every chapter of my Near-Death Experience memoir, MY SOMEWHERE ELSE, which I’ve serialized for release in this newsletter over the next month or two. If there’s enough interest in this story here, I’ll compile it for publication in paperback and ebook. Thanks for your support. If you can afford to paid subscription, it would help me to do this full-time. xoxo Alisa
You have several gifts. The gift of writing and playing your saxophone.
Again, as a retired teacher, I had a few students that I suspected had a life similar to you. I think about them a lot. I wonder if they broke out and were able to live in peace. I did call child protective services.
I always want to read more after each section, the story is so compelling. My father was a preacher and a narcissist. That image of your father pacing is very familiar, my father preferred hard-soled, heeled shoes and we had hardwood floors.