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Monsters of Harlem: Stories My Father Told Me


I learned what rape was when I was five.

I knew addiction could sunder families, and drive madness hastened by the desperate, frenzied conquest for drugs.

I still don’t know what he used. My grandfather. The monster of Harlem. But whatever the persuasion, I knew he would haunt me for the rest of my life. My father is a private man. He shares his heart with everyone, but secrets the raw bits lodged into a reservoir of reticence.

I didn’t know then what I know now.

He talked to me because he had no one else to share the broken pieces with. There exists an infallible sweet tenderness between us which continues to bloom into my adulthood, despite being separated by 1,238 abysmal miles.

The stories of Harlem, they saved me from the emptiness that would have been my life. I didn’t know it before because I knew nothing of drugs afore the turn of 2014- yet had I been without my Father’s stories, I would have been a heroin addict. I have no doubt about it. To shut out the depths of self-odium and mute the voices writhing under my cankerous, suppurated skin.

Blades don’t scare me. Needles are less than that. I didn’t think I would live past 21.

I had my bouts with self-mutilation, and for the moment, they have quelled into silence.

What I questioned in my teenage years, as to why my Father exposed me to the terrible reality of his life at the fledgling age of five, is clear to me now at 22. He wanted to save me. He wanted me to know what drugs were before I knew what drugs were.

From my childhood, he instilled in me the vigilance to rail against the scourge of addictive substances, by uttering the perversities of my grandfather.

I never call him that.

He was never a father.

We call him James.

I have a healthy wealth of aunts and uncles who attest to the beatings. The mutilation. The licentious incest forced. That side of my family trembles at the sight of rodents, not because they are frightened, but because they are immediately launched into their childhood: tattered blankets strewn on the barren floor, with the rats among them. They bite, I hear.

All of this? James. The bastard blinded my father by pouring bleach into his left eye, and with it singularly slaughtered every ambition of pursuing a career in law enforcement, the special services, and Navy Seals.

I will damn him eternally for this until the rest of my days.

I flourish where my Father was denied this; for this I hate myself. I know his love would not permit I feel this way, but I cannot control the stirrings of my heart. If I could wrest the tides of my life to turn back his, in an instant the world would lie at his feet.

But I cannot.

James brought his coterie of drug fiends into my Grandmother’s house to spend the rent money on cocaine (perhaps)- to then make a spectacle of his children. The ones he bloodied and maimed. The tiny toes of his conception to then sever one by one.

What was it, this veil of menace glazed over as a haze of evil incarnate compelling him? Was it the drugs? Surely they orchestrated much. Yet, what was the source of this misery? What justification would he offer prodded in hell in way of explanation? What woe was he the sole benefactor of to dredge the lives of my dearest Father into the purgatory of unfulfilled self-actualization?

I will never know. Because he is dead.

And I am glad for it.

But what use is his death bereft the power to mend time and space, restoring the joviality of life again to the spirits of my Father? His death then, as his life, is filled with the nothingness of travesty, enduring long after is wreaked.

Those stories, my father told me, that made me cry when I was five, saved my life.

Thank-you, Daddy.

JessicaRae Pulver-Adell is an addiction and recovery writer for Harbor Village. The Script is lucky to be able to share her work.

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