Autobiography - Robin Brasington



I found a caterpillar when I was about six. I found it down the road at the gray house. It was crawling down a tree beneath a huge web of caterpillars. I clutched it in my palm and ran across the pastures until I got home. At my door I opened my hand and discovered the little caterpillar curled up dead.

That same year I had to go to the hospital because of a kidney infection. My nurse was a man with long and wavy hair. I told him "You can't be a nurse you're a boy." In workbooks from school the doctors were always men and the nurses were always women. I didn't think about my pediatrician being a lady. It is strange to get so sick; suddenly something screws up in your body are your entire perception of the physical realm is distorted. I remember my Mom on the phone in the doctor's office calling my Dad to tell him I had to go in the hospital. She was crying. That made me cry. I was in the hospital for a day or two when all of the sudden, I just felt better. I started jumping on the bed with my IV and everything, saying, "Mama, Jesus touched me, Mama, Jesus touched me!"

One Sunday night I was in a church meeting with my mom. Some man stood up and said, "Now, I would like to have a vote so that women can speak and vote in these meetings. My wife is right here and she has just as many valuable things to say as I do". I guess that was the night that women became liberated at Snow Springs Baptist church.

When we got back from church Sunday mornings I would follow my sister, Lori. Sometimes we would take off our Sunday dresses and go out to the driveway in our slips (this was before they put gravel on the driveway). We would squash our toes in the mud. There were little purple moths that stood out against the orange mud. My Dad never went to church. He always says, "I don't like Baptist." I was saved and baptized when I was eight years old by the time I was twelve resentment of the hypocrisies of Christianity drove me away from my Mom's church.

When I was ten I started keeping a hate book in school. It was an old notebook with only a few pages left. I covered all of the paper surfaces with ugly crude faces, underneath every face was a name. My teacher Mrs. Hobson was the usual victim of my adolescence satire. My mother went to a PTA meeting at school around that time and threw out my hate book. She said, "It was ugly."

Around the same time in my life I would lie in bed at night on my stomach with my arms crossed. It hurt my swelling chest but I was determined not to grow breast. That same year I started growing pubic hair. I hadn't seen a grown woman necked in a long time so I thought I was a freak and shaved my pubic hair off. I might feel funny about that now but when I was a teenager my Grandma told me she did the same thing.

I made a friend named Taffy when I was eleven. She lived with her grandparents. They had chicken houses. We liked counting stars. Taffy moved to Tennessee the next year when her parents got out of jail. We kept in touch. She told me about losing her virginity to a kid named Bubba, about being beaten and fucked into the crypts, and about smoking weed and cigarettes. I thought she was the coolest girl in the world but I was depressed. I refused to do any work in school and sat in my desk all day reading adolescent fiction and making tiny braids in my hair. My mom took me to a psychologist and a doctor to get a drug test. She thought I was dyslexic or on drugs.

A few years later when I was fourteen we got the internet at my house. I signed up on mailing list to collect pornography. I never knew what the picture was of until I downloaded it. I collected hundreds of pictures but I didn't know how to erase them. Eventually all the files made the computer crash and my parents found all the pictures. I remember my Mom looking me right in the eyes and solemnly asking "Robin, what is wrong with you?"

I guess Taffy helped to start some type of disillusionment within myself. I started crawling out my window at night to carouse with my friends. One night I was with Slim, Big-D, and Beaker on our way back from Super Wal-Mart in Rome. Slim backed his Monte Carlo into a ditch while we were turning around. We were stuck. I was in a cow suit drinking wine coolers. We didn't know what to do when all of the sudden a big backwoods kind of guy pulled over in his truck and asked "Y'all need a hand." That guy pushed the Monty Carlo out of the ditch pretty much single-handedly. It was amazing. He must have been some kind of spirit walker (or on PCP).

When I was fifteen I started the virgins for life club. My friend thirteen-year-old friend, Shannon became the only other member. Shannon was from Shannon, GA and she lived on Shannon Road. Her Daddy was a pot farmer. He was also a former member of the KKK, I found that out when Shannon showed me his scary purple robes while we were hot boxing in his closet one day. Shannon ended up getting pregnant and having an abortion when she was fourteen so I guess that was the end of my virgins for life club. I talked to her a few years ago when she was seventeen. She said "My Daddy's a preacher now and I'm a born again Christian. I married Larry and we live out here on Kingston highway and I have a garden." That's the last I've heard from Shannon.

In high school I took art about eighty times (or five). My teacher, Ms. T. Turner, was a devout Christian that allowed me to smoke in the girl's bathroom. Ms. T. Turner was an unusual woman and the butt of many jokes because she had a paralyzed hand. She was run over once when she was out bike riding. While I was in school she married a man with a crippled thumb. She said, "It's just plain fate." Once she gave us all A's for attending a Christian rock show. We were a ludicrous group of cynical teens rocking with Jesus that night.

I went into the art room one day when and I was trying to decide on a college to go to. Ms. T.Turner told me "Your Daddy came here today and he told me to try and get you to go to Georgia State and I think it's horrible. You should go where you want." so after that I really pushed for art school. Money had always been like an invisible entity to me. Eventually, in art college, I learned how it felt to be poor and insane.

I met a boy in the dorms. He was from Austin TX and he was a million times cooler than me. He was a painter and a printmaker. We were the exact same size and would go shopping at thrift stores together and trade clothes. I thought he was sweet and talented. We ended up living together our sophomore year.

Then Matthew's grandfather killed himself and month later Matthew and I had an argument about housework. I stormed out of the apartment and when I got back Matthew was in the hospital because he had intentionally overdosed on his antidepressants. I don't think I ever forgave him for doing that. How could he do that to me? I was selfish in that situation. Matthew was eighteen and I was nineteen. A few months later we broke up and went our separate ways. Within six months he dropped out of school and was murdered. I was a psychological wreck at that time and still am a little bit. Time never erases pain it only makes it duller.