With my father being the way he was, I had grown accustomed to finding meaning in cheap things. He wasn’t the worst person in the world, but his vices could render him downright heartless when they had the chance. This meant that anything of monetary value in my possession would eventually disappear without a trace. Pawn shops, online selling, or even a quick exchange is how I imagined those little things turning into drugs, or alcohol, or money for either. “It’s a disease” he and my grandparents would say and that would be the end of the conversation. Any further arguments would lead to them calling me “selfish” or “bratty” for wanting to hold onto something material when there were bigger problems in the world. So instead of paying mind to it, I simply found peace in things he couldn’t sell.
Anything I would receive of any value I immediately mediated in my mind that I didn’t like it. A ratty computer printout of Renoir’s Dance at Bougival, tiny plastic dog figurines that I could purchase for a quarter at the Chinese buffet, and a paste stoned plastic brooch my best friend gave me in first grade are things I still hold on to because they escaped my fathers greedy wrath.
I was fourteen and went dumpster diving downtown. My usual hauls could produce old magazines I could clip interesting pictures from or broken bottles I could turn into art, but that day proved differently. I found a broken Polaroid 600. It was a sandy brown color and the bottom cartridge was cracked. Even if I could have afforded film, it wouldn’t have worked. It was tucked away in a matching carrying case with a strap and I took it as a sign to sling it over my person and take it home with me. I felt like Charlie when he found the last golden ticket.
I remember creeping into the house and finding my dad incapacitated in my parents room and feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. I could clean it up and figure out where to hide it before he saw it. Like many things I didn’t want to let go of, I found a place to hide them. Even if they weren’t worth anything, I would hide them just in case. I loved my dad, but I would never turn my back on his addiction and it’s taste for taking the things I loved. At fourteen, I had a system. Money was stashed in old VHS cases or taped in a plastic bag under the toilet tank lid, books stayed in my locker at school, and pictures or small trinkets were in a shoe box that hid in my closet under spare blankets. These were the places he never seemed to look through when he scavenged my room.
I was particularly proud of my three hiding spots for the camera. One was under layers of my bed. I was between beds at the time so the layers of towels, blankets, and sleeping bag already looked lumpy enough to hide a camera. The next was hanging in my closet concealed by my winter coat. My scarf hid the strap and the bulk of the coat hid the camera. The last, and my personal favorite, was in the floor vent by my bed. In all seriousness it could have started a fire, but at the time I thought it was ingenious. It was too big to fully fit down the vent, but small enough that it could completely shut. I would rotate hiding spots everyday before I went to school. I never took it to school for fear of it getting stolen or broken even more by someone. I don’t need to say this, but I will. Kids are assholes.
The following month was one of the best of my life. Having already had a few suicide attempts up to that point, this stopped those thoughts completely. I had always dreamed of doing something with film or photography, but never had the resources. it was also something i never verbally admitted to. I felt guilt with wanting something so artistic and foolhardy when there were more important things to focus on. With my broken camera I could run around town and “take pictures”. I could frame what I thought would be important images, I would set it on my dresser and reenact scenes from films pretending I was being filmed, and I would do these things for hours getting lost in my craft.
It had always felt like a selfish thing to do, but I can’t remember caring at that time. All my time and energy were being put into survival and making dad better, so having dreams or aspirations seemed worthless. While everyone around me was making plans to be the next Spielberg or Hendrix, I was focusing on what would happen if I went home that night. I suddenly realized that there was a chance I could do something bigger than I had imagined, and it all happened because of a broken Polaroid camera.
My therapist noticed a marked improvement in my behavior. She wasn’t really a therapist per say. She was the school guidance counselor whose job title was to assist students with their class schedules, but after one day of me refusing to wear a short sleeve shirt in gym class because of my wrists, she made it her mission to talk to me at least once a day. I started going into her office to talk about movies I loved and what kind of parts I would like to act out and for the first time since I met her, it wasn’t all depressing banter about what my dad did the following day to make my life Hell. Sure his vices didn’t cease because of the camera, but he wasn’t the only thing I was focusing on for once.
I was suddenly writing, drawing, painting, singing, acting, framing shots, and doing everything creative my mind ever desired without a thought to my father. I was, for a month, a kid and I didn’t feel guilty about it. Like many things, it came to an end.
It was a Monday when it happened. I had gotten home from school and had this familiar feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right. Usually when this happened it meant that dad was on an angry binge and I subconsciously knew to watch myself when entering the house. This time though, it was eerily quiet.
I remember entering my room and seeing the aftermath of total chaos. It’s interesting how I could gauge how bad he “needed” something by how destroyed my room was. He had done it before in his pursuit for money or something to pawn, but this was by far the worst. My makeshift bed was now separate scraps of towel and blanket, my closet had everything ripped out of it and on the floor, the drawers of my dresser were pulled out and dumped, my poems and pictures on the wall were ripped off, and the vent cover concealing my most prized possession was across the room reveling and empty vent. I stood there for what was probably hours. I stood there until it was dark outside before quietly going about my routine of cleaning up the mess. Poems and pictures back on the wall, drawers in the dresser again, push stuff back in the closet and organize later, and make up the bed again extra special so I can try and sleep a bit better that night.
I remember feeling like I was between two extremes. I felt like I could simultaneously disassociate for fifteen years and burn the house down from pure rage. I wandered the house until I found dad in the basement. He was passed out on the couch looking drunk and satisfied and it pissed me off to no end. I couldn’t do anything. He had sold the camera and gotten what he wanted and there was no way of finding out where it went or getting him to get it back for me. He wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to admit when he was wrong. Of all the things in the house, he sold the broken camera. I remember looking at his music equipment, his fishing gear, and any number of things that could have gone before my camera and the anger boiled up until I kicked him. One sharp fast kick into his side. It was all I could do. He woke up and looked at me for a minute. A small glance of understanding before he went back to sleep. That’s all that was ever said about the camera was that small look. No apologies, no remorse, just an understanding of why I was mad.
I felt stupid about getting so attached. I kept beating myself up because dreams of acting and doing something artistic with your life were only for certain people. Some of us just survived and I felt sheepish for thinking I could do anything more than that. To my therapists horror, I was dragged into her office the following week after a teacher caught me in a school bathroom holding a scalpel to my wrist I had swiped from the science lab. I felt even more stupid crying and telling her how the camera was gone and detailing how I let something like a broken camera dictate my life.
I never told anyone else. My mom, dealing with keeping a house together and everything my dad was throwing at her, never knew a lot of the things he did. She probably would be in prison for killing him if she knew a fraction of what I knew, and knowing that, I never told her. We were women without a country because my dad was so beloved by friends and family that they never believed us when we would tell them the things he had done. Between a rock and a hard place, we were fossilized by my dads popularity. The last thing I wanted to do was add more to her plate over something like a camera.
I grieved for my camera in private, like I did with everything else. When he pulled me by my hair so hard that my scalp bled I cried quietly in my closet reading Elie Wiesel reminding myself that things could be worse, when he drunkenly screamed at me that I wasn’t going to amount to anything because I messed up a note while practicing piano I cried the shower, when he sold my camera for booze I proceeded to sneak out every night for two weeks and cry on a bench at a local park in the early hours of the morning. Privately is how you grieve when you aren’t allowed to dream or be a kid.
Years later I realize that it wasn’t necessarily the absence of the camera that made me so angry. It was the fact that he knew it made me happy and he deliberately took it away from me. Some semblance of normalcy is what I desperately wanted. When other kids were bitching that their parents didn’t get them the right color of IPod, I was crying over a broken camera and dashed dreams.
A year or two later I would get my revenge, though it didn’t feel as good as I had imagined. My father found a vintage Beatles guitar pin featuring Paul McCartney’s face. A genuine relic from the sixties that was already going for a decent chunk of change according to my dad. He babbled excitedly about the prospect of making some “real money” off of the small plastic pin. When he passed out later one day, I took it off the counter and proceeded to play dumb in the two weeks he looked for it.
He knew I took it. He didn’t want to outright say that I did, but he knew. Revenge made me even more crafty with my hiding spots this time. When the pin was in the house it was always on my person. I kept it pinned to my bra strap or the outside of my panties knowing full well he wouldn’t look there and that I could take him if for some reason he did. When I showered, it hid behind the toilet in the locked room. I hid it at school in my locker when the guilt set in at home and I was playing my conscious on whether to return it. He destroyed the basement looking for it. His kind an inquisitive “Did you take it?” turned into “Where the fuck is it?”. I never let on that I took it.
He never found it and forgot about it weeks later, but to this day I still have it. I don’t particularly feel anything for it. I’ve never worn it on a jacket or pinned it to my satchel, but I still have it. After dad died, someone told me I should place it at his grave as a way of forgiveness, but I’m not going to do that. In the wake of my dad’s death, I realized something important. I can miss him, but I don’t have to forgive him for everything. He doesn’t suddenly get his pin back after making my life a living Hell just because he died. Cynical, some would call that, but I call it knowing my worth.
As for the camera, I don’t know what ever happened to it. I always had this dream where I would be wandering a pawn shop or flea market and I would see it with it’s case and know instantly that it was MY camera. The same sandy brown camera with a crack at the bottom. I would get it and never part with it again. Years later after a successful life of acting and writing, it would sit among my awards as the crown jewel of my success. The turning point from depressed suicidal kid just trying to survive, to an artist who made their mark on the world.
