Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006 - 9:20 p.m.

Now that I've talked to my mother and my brother about various things, I've been putting two and two together and figuring out exactly how badly I've been fucked over by my father in the last 20 or so years.

There was the oil well he purchased in my name and then sold, claiming it never made any money...and yet, I paid $2000 in taxes on what the IRS labelled "undeclared income" a few years later. At the time, I thought I must have made a huge mistake on my taxes, and I got a second job and paid it off, working 90 hours a week to do so...and now I'm realizing *I* didn't make a mistake. I paid taxes on the $18K I made that year. The "undeclared income" the IRS was talking about was money my father made in my name and then pocketed. I remember several other little bits of property and the like my father has also purchased in my name over the years, and I wonder how many of those are just waiting to bite me on the ass sometime down the road.

There's $50K+ in college money I never saw a penny of. And that's not counting the Manhattan fund that started this whole little voyage of discovery.

There's the savings account my mother insisted I start back in 4th grade, in which I had to deposit 75% of all my chore money (which was far more substantial than the $5-10 chore money most people make, since mine was hard manual labor on a dairy farm and was more along the lines of $100 or more every week), into which I dumped almost all of my earnings from 4th thru 10th grade. The savings account that somehow disappeared the summer I spent travelling with 4H, that my father was the trustee of, and which, according to the Texas State Comptroller's Office still holds 28 unclaimed dollars. My father waved me off years ago when I asked about it, telling me oh, didn't I remember, I had moved that money into another account....which I somehow never opened or reaped the benefits of. Approximately $5200 a year for over 6 years. And I get $28 of it. Assuming my dad doesn't somehow manage to beat me to it.

Regarding the nefarious Manhattan fund, my mother the CPA estimates that, assuming the fund stayed solvent and demonstrated a moderate rate of return, the $1000 invested in 1967 would now be hovering somewhere in the neighborhood of $30K. It turns out, my brother knew about his, because he used to get the quarterly statement. I never got mine. I never got mine because my father, the trustee on the account - had them sent to him. My brother stopped getting his statements sometime in the mid-80s, and never having really been familiar with it to begin with, since our parents never informed us of our shares in the fund, he didn't think to question it...until my father told him last week that he was trying to recover the money for us. I told my brother gee, that's funny - he told me it was his money and that he was trying to get it back from the state who had taken it from him. This was news to my brother, who is now having a little "hmm" moment of his own. My personal thought on the manner is that my own shares are mostly gone, as according to the comptroller's office, the state is holding 32 shares in my name...at anywhere from $8-13/share. Not even an acorn, frankly. But my brother's doesn't seem to have been touched. This is not surprising to me, as every week when he paid me for chores, my father would solemnly inform me he had paid my brother twice as much as he had me, "because he deserves more. He's a boy, and he worked twice as hard as you, so he deserves twice as much." And then he would show me my brother's check, along with my own, and there it would be: $90 for me, $180 for my brother. Or $180 for me, $360 for John. John, who was a year younger than me and very small for his age, who would drive the truck while I would stand back on the flatbed trailer and heave 75 pound haybales up onto the rails of the cow troughs, cut the wires, and slide the hay in. I weighed 98 pounds. Those bales weighed almost as much as I did. The adult MEN my father employed were amazed and would gather to watch me do it. I could lift the damn things as high as my head. That's what happens when your psychotic and abusive father tells you he wants all the cows fed by a certain time. You learn to lift the bales and slide them up the trough, because failure is not an option if you want to keep your skin intact. But my brother worked harder, so he deserved more. Because he was a boy.

I guess he deserved to keep his money, too.

You'd think I'd hate my brother, but I don't. We were really close as kids, even when we fought. We were like war buddies. He's still the only person who really knows what I went thru, and I share a bond with him no one else can touch, even though we went for 8 years without any contact at all because my mother went into hiding after the divorce. My father had told my mother he'd kill her, and she believed it. At the time, I thought that was silly, but the more I find out about my dad, the less I think she overreacted. John went to live with my dad in the divorce, while my baby brother and I went with Mom. I regret that because of the toll it took on my relationship with my brother, but I don't regret a single second of the time I missed with my father. I used to tell people he was dead, anyway, because it was a lot easier than having to explain that I didn't speak to him anymore because he was a fucking nutcase and my mother was afraid of him. Could you look your friends in the eye and say you know, when I was a kid, I could hear my dad raping my mother just down the hall, and he was really an abusive prick to me and my brothers, so I prefer to absent myself from him?

Can you say "trailer trash"?

My mother came from a good family. My grandmother was wealthy. Both of my grandfathers on my mother's side came from good family, and my stepgrampa, the one I still miss, who was my grampa when I was born, was a self-made man of means. The Colonel, my mother's father, was a career military man who taught me to play chess and took me golfing. My mother's brothers are scientists, my mother is a specialist in tax law and can do everything short of accompany you to court, because she doesn't care to be an actual attorney and so did not take the bar. My father's family was blue collar, but my dad worked hard and had a degree in physics from CalPoly. He worked for General Dynamics, in the Red Eye missile program. When I was 4, he bought a dairy in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, and payed cash for it. He expanded operations and bought a second dairy a year later. We still own that land, as well as a third dairy - 300+ acres - in south central Texas. We were members of the country club, where we attended swank parties requiring white dresses and gloves (man, did I hate those), and my brothers and I went to private school. At the time of their divorce, my parents were worth somewhere between 2 and 3.5 million. In 1979. When 3 million dollars was actually money. We lived in a 5 bedroom, 3 bath, $863,000 sprawling ranch home on 5 acres, with a fucking pond and a backhouse. I had a horse I got for my 15th birthday. My parents were politically active and known members of one or two national organizations requiring attendance at huge conventions in places like Chicago. We were not, as you say, "trash".

And if I told you the half of it, you would not believe the shit that went down at Chez Doyle. The few of my friends who know some it are still surprised when new stuff comes out, and none of them know that bit about my dad raping my mom. My own brothers don't even know that shit. Their fucking bedrooms were always at the other end of the house, so that particular joy is all mine to keep. My own mother doesn't know I know it, because how humiliating would that be, for your own daughter to say, "so Mom, I heard dad raping you in your room all those times. I heard you sobbing and begging him to stop and crying out in pain, and I wanted desperately to help you, but I was terrified to face what was going on in there, and I'm so sorry that I couldn't."

I'm falling apart, people. I am slowly fucking falling apart. I really don't know how much longer I can keep this shit together. I thought I did a pretty good job of it over the years, but really, it's just piling up and amounting to too much, and frankly, I really don't know what to do. I was thinking about that on the way to the shrink today and realizing just how thinly strung I am, that my life is a huge house of cards, and it's really starting to come down, and I thought of all the shrinks I've had over the years and that every single one of them has told me how remarkably together I am for all the shit I've had to deal with, and the next thing I knew, I was literally in hysterics, right there at the bottom of the Van Nuys exit ramp from the 101, laughing so hard I was crying, and I couldn't stop. I just can't believe they all thought this was together. I can't believe anyone fucking thinks I've got any of this under control, because I don't. And it's spiralling out of control in ever tighter and faster spirals, and I really don't know how much more I can take or how to get it all straightened out. What the fuck is normal? How do you be normal? How do you fucking live a normal life, with a normal job, paying the bills, buying a car, owning a house, getting married, raising kids, teaching them to be normal people with normal lives, doing all the normal shit you see in movies or television or other normal people doing??? How do you just fucking get up every day and face all the shit a day has just waiting to dish at you? How do you make decisions? How do you find a job that doesn't make you want to blow your brains out? How do you take it when your life folds up and yanks the carpet out from under you? How do you survive break ups and major life-changing events? How do you keep a place to live and pay bills and not end up living on the street?

I really fucking need to know.

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