Life is too short to read a bad book.
James Joyce
I am getting ready to move out of the home I shared with x. The home our child has lived in her whole life. The home I lived in when I fell madly in love with him and then personally placed alarm sensors on every door and window when it all ended and my fear of him skyrocketed.
Over the last month, I have been going through my books, one by one, to try to shed some weight before the move.
I have too many books.
I have not-ever-enough books.
I whittled the count down by over a hundred books and then began boxing up the ones I intend to keep. I started on the cabinet that held the least sentimental and then, last, went to box up the built-in cabinet with my most beloved books.
The top shelf is my favorite authors. The second shelf is books that made me want to be a writer. The whole cabinet is filled with books that speak to me in a way not many do: to my core and in a way I can’t ever find the exact right words to describe, books that remind me why writing is like water – able to get at places nothing else can, books that remind me of the way that words sustain me.
This task is a dusty one. The built-in cabinets in the living room have leaded glass doors so I don’t dust them often. If I’m being honest, in the dozen years I’ve lived here, I’ve probably dusted these shelves four or five times.
I pulled books from the top and some from the second shelf and then taped the box, the loud sound of the packing tape making my daughter cringe each time.
I got up to move the box onto the other piles of boxes and popped a new packing box into shape. I wiped my itchy nose with my wrist and forearm to avoid wiping the book dust on my own face.
As I pulled books from the third shelf – the one shelf that also held books I have not read yet, but intend to read – I saw a book I did not recognize. It was a hardcover with no dust jacket.
I pulled it by the spine and turned it to read the title. Marilyn Manson’s book. The Long Hard Road Out of Hell.
I flipped it over in my hand, as though I couldn’t possibly be reading the words correctly. As though the back would have the real title.
I set it back on the third shelf, now almost empty, and started pulling other books off the shelf and making a Tetris-like game of fitting them into the half-full box.
I felt my mouth turned down and my head pulled back slightly as though the book radiated something painful that was pulling my body into unnatural positions.
What the hell. There’s no way.
I tried so hard to refocus. To ignore that navy hardback laid down on the now otherwise empty shelf.
I did not buy that book. I know that.
I did not put that book on that shelf. I know that.
What the fuck. Really? This?
Sometime in 1994, right before Marilyn Manson became the darling of MTV and baby goths everywhere, I heard his name come out of the mouth of one of my dearest friends who was in the midst of being sucked into the world of Anton LeVay, a world another friend and I instantly recognized as a cultish place of subjugation and abuse and misogyny.
This friend came home around 6am that day after being gone all night. Anton’s wife had driven her home after going through the Jack in the Box drive through to get them all breakfast.
She was talking fast and showing us this new CD by this guy Marilyn Manson and telling us how he had shown up at the all black San Fransisco home of LaVey with Traci Lords the night before and hung out with them for hours.
She was starstruck.
I was nauseous.
I remember clenching my fists and trying to hide them in the middle of my crossed legs and the other friend and I sat on her floor trying to stay visibly open to her stories so we wouldn’t lose her forever.
She put the CD in her boombox (it was the 90s) and hit play. After the interlude, the song Cake and Sodomy started and she said something like isn’t this amazing?
My friend pulled away from the world of LaVey just weeks after this morning, but not before LaVey’s wife cut her long hair into a mess of jagged layers just to prove she’d let them. Not before she had bought stillettos and a certain shade of red lipstick, all specifically picked out by LaVey, to put on before showing up at their house to sit around like some kind of fetish eye candy.
I have always associated Manson with the same kind of poser dark-arts abuser as LaVey, who trolled the Stonestown Galleria Olive Garden for lonely, young waitresses to invite to his home like a collection of faux-satanic barbies.
That foggy morning in 1994, Marilyn Manson was instantly intertwined with the notion of lies and hypocrisy and abuse, for me, long before the stories of his atrocious actions came to light.
Even when I was deep into reading thick tomes of Queer Theory and wanted to champion Manson’s barbie-crotch genderfuck rants, I just couldn’t. He gave me the ick no matter how I tried to intellectualize it.
I tried shedding the old feelings but something about him still made the hairs on my arm rise, even when just hearing his name.
There’s no way I had anything to do with that book ending up on my bookshelf.
No way I put it anywhere near my most beloved books. I would never have put him in the same cabinet as Carole Maso and Melanie Rae Thon and Toni Morrison.
No fucking way.
x knew how I felt about Marilyn Manson.
No way. It can’t be.
But anything can be, when it comes to him. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that.
I spent the first two years after ending it with him crossing things off the list of what I thought he’d never do.
On that dark night before our last series of hearings, when he had that last overnight visit after reading my latest submissions about his actions and the declaration his ex-wife provided, I had to face that I could never predict how far he would go. That I could never rule anything out when it came to him.
That night, when I heard the sirens a block away and I put on my flipflops and got in my car to circle his apartment building and make sure those sirens weren’t for my precious V, I had to fully face that I had no reliable sense of what he wouldn’t do.
I had to face there was nothing too small for him to do. Nothing too large.
He had to have put that book there.
There’s no other explanation.
But even typing it here, I can hear people say that’s just really fucking paranoid.
It took me almost a year after ending it with x to admit to myself that he had been hiding my keys occasionally. To realize not only is that something that people like him do (to unsettle us, to gain power in the relationship by making us doubt our own sanity/ability to manage life) but that he did that. To me. It took a full year of me not losing anything, even though I was more stressed and distracted than ever, to realize that he had been tucking stuff away to make me feel like I was losing my mind.
One thing you learn after leaving someone like x is that they have and will do anything to fuck with you. To feel powerful.
What others see as paranoid, we know is them reaching out into every nook of our lives in order to unsettle us in easily dismissed, undercover ways.
A book? Small. Such a small thing.
He probably got it free. He was eternally cheap (unless it was his own shoes or guitars), something I admired in him initially, so I know he didn’t buy it new.
But he got it somehow and he tucked it between books by my favorite writers.
Who knows when. Before I found out he was a cheating liar? Maybe. After? Most likely.
x and folks like him like to call those they abuse petty. Just like everything else, that is projection.
He got his hands on a book by a man whose name alone makes my skin crawl and then tucked it into the one cabinet in the house where it would be the most offensive.
And he just left it there. Not knowing when I would find it.
Abusers like x always play the long game.
They don’t even need to know when something might hurt us in order to just tuck it away in their mind and feel superior knowing that someday we will find it.
Their tentacles are spread out and have dipped into all the corners of our lives.
I recently finished season five of Fargo and I found myself, only haflway through the episodes, wanting to go outside and say this! this! this is how it feels to know that they could try to come back and hurt us at any time.
Even if most of us weren’t living with a Roy Tillman, the idea of laying low and not attracting his attention is so marrow-deep that I wanted the world at large to make the connection.
This is what it feels like to not know if they will truly leave you alone.
This is how it is to know they hate you so much for leaving them that they will do anything to hurt you.
We are never free.
Even though we are.
This book is not Tillman sending out his goons to kidnap me and chain me to a metal bed. I know this. I am not saying it is even close to the same.
But it is their diabolical and calculated presence reaching out over time to remind us that they have no bounds.
I’m sure he put that book on that shelf way before any of us knew what an abusive and truly disgusting person Manson is. Before I knew, for sure, that my raised hairs were completely founded in the reality of who that man is and what he has done.
For x, I am sure it was just to put something in my space that would unsettle me.
A little secret for him while he lived here. For him to feel like he had the upper hand and was so much smarter than me.
I’m so grateful that I found this book now and not in that first year out.
Finding it now, it reminds me how impotent and futile his efforts generally are and puts bold print on how different I am now from the woman who was afraid to even admit she was afraid of him.
Two days after finding that book, I saw an article stating Manson was ordered to pay Evan Rachel Woods attorney fees. This is surely the only time that reading his name made me smile.
Fuck Marilyn Manson.
Fuck x.
Fuck that trash book where he tries to get sympathy and seem cool.
Fuck men who need to control women to feel powerful.
Here’s to women who refuse to be broken by these men.
Here’s to setting those old, tired books back on the empty shelf and seeing the truth and then moving on.
Here’s to being totally out of reach.
Life After Emotional Abuse 