Home is where the heart is. It's where you can take off your cardigan and hang it up in the closet behind the front door; all the while a toy trolley train comes whizzing by, nearly flying off its tracks from the sheer velocity at which it turned the corner. 962 Jeanne Ave was not a neighborhood of make believe and I did not wear cardigans. Instead, it was the source of anger, anxiety and abandonment among other demons.
From early 1991 thru late 1999, 962 Jeanne [jee-nee] Ave was my "home". I know this because I was in second grade when we moved in and ninth grade when we left. It's located in East San Jose, zip code 95116. That's nearly downtown. You can googlemap it. It's two hundred feet from the tragic epicenter that is public housing apartments. Kids living down the street chastised me for being rich and living in a house. We were far from rich. We lived in the ghetto.
When I think of this house and the memories attached to it, I remember all the times my parents weren't there. I remember when my older brother became an authority figure and a violent one at that. I remember creating a refuge by barricading my bedroom door with furniture. I remember wanting to hear the sound of a car pulling into the driveway.
There were some good parts to the house, mostly on the outside. On the property there stood approximately one lime, one fuji apple, two pear and four persimmon fruit-bearing trees. There was also John. John shared a fence with us. John was a 7-foot something retired old white man who traded me his homegrown quamquats and heirloom tomatoes for beers. There was also that camper trailer in the back that became my fort. And there was also the neighbor's great mulberry tree that made foder for my fatty silk worms. This is how 962 Jeanne Ave should be remembered.
I don't want to remember all the bad shit that happened in my childhood, but there's a lot of bad shit to block out. And I've tried explaining my past to some people, particularly my physciatrist, and my boyfriend. I just get emotional and cry. My physciatrist put me on suicide watch during our first session because all I did was cry. Now that I don't have a physciatrist anymore, I'll try to spill my guts here.
