Jennifer Filannino
Jennifer Filannino is an adjunct professor at Kean University who teaches World Literature, Composition, and Creative Writing. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from Monmouth University. Since she received her first journal at ten years old she has been exploring the internal world through writing. And although her early journal entries about her latest crushes, favorite colors, and battles with her sister were not as enriched as the essays, poems, and stories she writes now, she still values the innocent wisdom of those years. Filannino holds accolades for poetry, creative nonfiction, and academic essays, and now writes fiction.
The Hanged Man
Part 1, 2002. I walked up two flights of stairs to Kurt’s apartment with one mission in mind: total obliteration. I escaped after an argument with Tom needing to get away from his bristly beard and wall of misunderstanding. He wanted to have dinner with his ex-girlfriend, yet again, and I didn’t want him to. “No way,” I said. “Don’t you understand?” Letters and pictures of her and them as a couple—kissing and holding hands—were still stacked in a box in his closet after we’d been together for over a year. Whenever he wasn’t home, I’d hide in the closet and rip up the ones I hated the most, the close ups that illuminated her white blonde hair and freckly face. I’d hide the shreds in the bottom of the box hoping he’d find the little pieces. “It’s just dinner, Jennie,” he’d say. “We’re only friends. I want to make sure she’s doing okay.” And I’d have flashbacks of the framed photo he kept above his bed for the first few months we were dating, her translucent blue eyes piercing through me every time we kissed. I would try to block her out, but the picture remained there for months staring at me, whispering, Tom loves me, not you. You’re just a phase. He’d have dinner with her once a week, tell me she was sick and needed a friend. I’d acquiesce only later to be tortured by the blonde angel tattoo resembling her that danced on his thigh every time we made love. “Only friends!?” I shrieked. “Fuck off.” And slammed the door.
I drove eighty-five miles an hour on the highway, blinded by rage, anticipating shot after shot and smoking out of Kurt’s bubbler, hot boxing his bathroom. I entered through the kitchen and Kami, my best friend, was sitting at the table sipping white wine. Kurt stood over her with his hand on the back of her neck. His bandmate, Jared, leaned against the refrigerator, preying on a young girl with a pixie cut and tiny features. Weezer’s new album blared in the background and they sang in unison. Kami remained poised at the table; her legs crossed perfectly, and head held high. Her deep-set brown eyes penetrated me as if to say, Sit down. I smiled crookedly, said “Yo,” and walked over to the kitchen counter. I grabbed a bottle of vodka and asked Kurt to do a shot with me. Bottles of liquor and mixers lined the kitchen counter and half empty beers cluttered the table. He nodded and poured two. The music blasted, It’s just the thought of you in love with someone else. It breaks my heart to see you hangin’ from your shelf. I screamed the lyrics encouraging everyone to liven up, tapped the glass on the table and tossed the warm liquid burning into the back of my throat. “Another one!” I hollered. “Does anyone else wanna join me?”
The other faces at the table peered up with disinterest and continued discussing the difference between underground grunge and garage rock music. Jared, the shaggy, dark-haired boy who took my virginity a few years earlier, began stroking the pixie girl’s face and giving her the same look he gave me, an intense stare as if no one else existed in the room. I wondered if she was a virgin and if he would humiliate her in the same way, date her on and off for a year and then tell her she was no fun anymore, because she started falling in love with him.
“Ugh, band guys, so self-absorbed, especially the front man,” I whispered to Kurt, who remained in the shadows as the drummer. People from the other rooms floated in and out of the kitchen while Kurt and I continued to throw back shots until Kami spoke up.
“Yo, do you two realize it’s only been like an hour? Chill the fuck out. And Jennie, give me your car keys. Hand ‘em over now, whore.”
“I’m fine, not even tipsy yet. I’ll stop in a little bit and sober up.”
“Yeah, okay, that’s what you said a few weeks ago when you ran over the curb and almost killed us. Just give me your keys, Jen.”
Whenever I attempted to argue back, she’d shut her mouth and stare back at me with a look so venomous that I caved.
“Fine, bitch—Kurt, I’m gonna do another shot. Anyone else?”
Kurt declined and joined Kami to hide my keys. He was frequently boxed in by Kami’s control. The guitarist appeared behind me, his 250-pound body towering over me like a shade tree. He grabbed the bottle of vodka and shot glasses and put his arm around my shoulder, pulling me into the living room.
“You don’t need the Sprite anymore at this point, do you?”
I never told Kami about the fight. In fact, she barely knew the details involving Tom’s friendship with his ex-girlfriend. I knew what her reaction would be, possible confrontation of the ex or Tom. Chastising me for allowing him to even think of her. She had punched her boyfriend in the jaw for flirting with a girl. Her knuckles remained raw and red for weeks. “Men are pigs,” she would say. “Fuck them. They need to be trained.” And even though I agreed, my inner child feared standing up to a man, or anyone, really. I preferred acting out my rage surreptitiously, hiding in Tom’s closet and tearing his private pictures up. I liked the anguish of being the victim rather than the warrior, of letting pain bubble and fester rather than treating the wound. There was a comfort in secrets, as long as they were kept.
When Tom and I first started hooking up, Kami and a few of my girlfriends went to a house party at Tom’s. His ex-girlfriend was also there hanging around with the same four girls all night, sipping on beers and staring around the room. I’d catch her sneaking glances at me and Kami. We’d lock eyes, grin at one another and then look away. Her pallor made her glow under the Christmas lights hanging from the wall. I kept a sideways glance on her knowing that I needed something from her, but it wasn’t peace.
I attached to a barstool, taking shot after shot and washing the burn down with rum and Cokes, until I was loosed-lipped and hot-hipped and flittering around the room. All the while Tom was in the garage with the boys smoking cigars, while they took turns doing donuts in the mud. I’d go out to visit him, just to ensure that he knew I was his girl. I’d kiss him and hang around until I couldn’t stand the cigar smoke and nonsensical man talk anymore. He got drunker and drunker, forgetting my presence, so I’d flit back to observe the halo of his ex-girlfriend Linny’s glow.
Kami left the party early but I stayed at the bar with one of Tom’s friends so I could study the ex’s glowing blue eyes and shining blonde hair, white in the darkness. My blood surged with booze and my body felt brazen, ready to get what was mine. The girls danced to popular 80’s music, giggling as they took turns doing the robot and kicking their legs in the air. I watched the angel wings tattooed on her bony back mimic flight every time she swayed her arms to the music. I wanted to trace the lines with my fingers and smell her skin, to see if it carried the same flowery scent as the love letters in his secret box, the ones he wouldn’t get rid of. I finally approach her. I asked her to sit at the bar with me for a shot. Then to dance. I grabbed her hand and we spun, tripping over one another’s feet. A strand of her hair ended up in my mouth. She smelled exactly like the box in his closet. I bite the strand of musty hair, saturated with cigarette smoke and lilacs.
“Linny,” I whispered. “Can I kiss you?” Her skin was white and freckled, cheeks like lace. I took her hand and led her to the bathroom. I closed the door and kissed her with my hot mouth, overwhelmed with alcohol and anger. She licked the surface of my lips with her cold tongue, still wet from beer. And then I knew I’d gotten exactly what I wanted.
Part 2, 2002. The time was exactly 2:50 a.m. when my car flipped over, smashed two parked SUV’s, then landed upside down on the pavement. That’s what the newspaper clipping said, the one my mother laminated and stored away in her underwear drawer. Some images are clearer than others, like the female EMT with brown hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, her puffy winter coat too big in the shoulders. Her voice soothing, direct, and clear. Others are blurry, like clutching onto the steering wheel and flying as if my car had wings, thinking that I must hold as tightly as possible. These puzzle pieces of my holey memory, blacked out from booze and a concussion, are all that remain of that generous night, when given yet another chance to be. The other puzzle pieces are filled in from newspaper clippings, police reports, friends and family members. Without these things and people to recollect, it would be a fantastical dream where I escaped death like a female Houdini.
A gentle knock on the window and a woman’s voice. Her brown hair has clips holding strands back. She shined a flashlight showing shards of glass and warm liquid surrounding my forehead. I couldn’t move. My legs were trapped, and I was suspended from my seat belt, arms hanging lifelessly. A knock on the window again.
“Miss, you’ve been in a serious car accident and you’re stuck in your car. We need to use the Jaws of Life to cut you out. Just hang on, you’re going to be fine.”
There was nothing I could do but hang on, wait and think. Being upside down and trapped has a way of giving one perspective. Afraid to cry because of the glass near my eyes, I closed the lids and tried to blacken the scene, thought about the numbness in my body, the potential scarring of my face, the alcohol streaming through my blood. Thought about all the possible scenarios. Then, I woke up lying in the hospital bed, where a doctor loomed above me with a needle and thread in his hand. He was stitching up my forehead. I kept still and silent on the table, listening to the muttering of others in the waiting room. My parents, Tom, a cop. The police officer kept walking away and lingering by the emergency room door, glancing at me. His big shoulders took up half the doorway.
As the needle pierced my numbed skin, my mind wandered over possibilities. Each prick brought a new painful thought. I wondered if my face would be permanently disfigured, or if fragments of glass would be forever lodged underneath the layers of skin, just like the gravel from the bicycle accident, staining the skin under my forearm gray. I ran my tongue over my gums and felt half my front tooth missing. Sharp and jagged, it was the same tooth I lost from the bicycle accident six months before the car accident. I wasn’t wearing a helmet that day, so when my tire got stuck on a pebble, I soared over the handlebars and smashed headfirst on the pavement. The six-year-old that I had been babysitting for years had to knock on a stranger’s door, because his caretaker was unconscious and bloody on the sidewalk. For over a month, I walked around with two black eyes and a swollen, misshapen head, unable to communicate properly or spell. I left the half-shattered front tooth for months because half of me didn’t care. It’s a story, just my body. It symbolized the grace I was given to survive and reminded me of my impermanence.
As I wait for the doctor to finish threading me back together, yet again, I wonder how I ended up in the emergency room, yet again, with the same exact injuries. Maybe it was because I had finally decided to fix my tooth. Maybe it was because I never learned. Maybe if I didn’t stop seeking death, death would finally catch me. I couldn’t keep escaping it. That I knew.
The doctor pinched the needle through my forehead and pulled. I closed my eyes and retreated into my blurry mind, still drunk and confused from the concussion. Flashbacks of the accident overwhelmed my mind every time I close my eyes. Being covered in blood and glass. Being upside down. Being trapped and compacted in my car. Thoughts flooded through me: I’m getting arrested and going to lose my license. My parents will kick me out and Tom will finally leave me. I killed someone. My car is wrecked. I heard them murmur about the other car I destroyed. My mom whimpered and said, “How could she, Luca? Again, and again.”
My stomach burned with worry. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, to be too drunk to comprehend the aftermath. Not until later, I thought, will I deal with yet another one of my mistakes. Not until I’m forced to sit upright and walk out of the comfort of the ER into the real world with the three people who came to my rescue at four in the morning. Not until then will I deal with their narrowed eyes and strident tones, while I sit in the back of my father’s red Volkswagen Jetta, Tom’s arm clutching my shoulder, our guilt hanging around us like polluted air.
Months later I continuously re-enacted the accident on my bedroom floor. I am merely an actor practicing a scene for a high school play: Drive Drunk End up Dead. I locked my door and dress in the same clothes: a beige Marc Jacobs sweater with cherries all over it, and light wash hip hugger Abercrombie jeans with slits in the knees. I was so proud of those size 2 jeans and the way they slagged around my hip bones, unbeknownst to me that they were a product of my downward spiral. I played Jeff Buckley's “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and listened to it on repeat on my bedroom floor with my face buried in the dark blood spots on the sweater, sobbing uncontrollably asking God why I had survived once again. I knew it wasn’t over this time, that I would have to keep practicing—my role was not yet perfected. I knew I’d have many more passes and not enough ultimate fails. So I listened to the lyrics as if they were being sung directly to me, as if my lone emptiness wasn’t the only thing left for me to feed.