THAT DAY

I'm going through my dad's old slides from the sixties and seventies (sorry, can't show you; privacy issues, as you'll see). Find one undated box of miscellaneous slides--to my astonishment they include a dozen photos of these two girls we met, summer 1971, sunning beside our family on a Lake Tahoe beach. They made a huge impression on me, but I was too shy to talk to them much. They triggered the first erotic dream recorded in my journal, Baseball Naga; the next night was my first blatant psychic dream, The Murders. The aggressive voyeurism of my dad's photos partly explains why I was so shy--my dad was 1: an adult male ogling & shooting teenage girls at the beach, and 2: filming US TOO and then teasing me if I tried to talk to girls my age. No wonder I shut down--asexual neutrality was the only safe course.

A second set from 1972 of my little sister Miriel at 12. She could pass for adult! Happily seductive. She's made no secret our dad lusted after her, though never actually molested her. She's framed it as plain victimhood but these shots make it clear she encouraged, even baited him. Seeing these forty years later I'm turned on. Looks like my incest feelings about her were mere echoes of her powerful entanglement with our dad. In contrast, a set with our sister Althea and our black cat Purr are sensual, elegant (and quite professional portraits), but not directly flirting. But Miriel was complicit--well, as complicit as you can be at 12. That is, not very.

A third set from 1969, black and white, of us and our best friends the Lee sisters. Moody, sexy, especially of the youngest, Juana, who was only about eight.

I could miss the message of just one set, but not three; a real pattern here. My dad sexualized young girls--as young as eight. For years, I've felt guilt for incestuous and pedophilic feelings, even if I didn't act on them... but those feelings didn't fall on me out of a clear blue sky.

THAT NIGHT

Miriel and I are in the Lees' house across the street from us when we were kids. Juana, the youngest of the Lee sisters, looks about 11 or 12. She shoulders a heavy rocket a couple of feet long; it looks military grade. She arms the warhead; a diode blinks red. Will she fire it off? For a long few minutes it's uncertain--we try to talk her out of it--but at last she feels forced to. "Use it or lose it" she says.

But we're indoors! It'll just hit the walls. May punch through one--they're flimsy Eichler wallboard, after all--but this place is a maze, there are several walls before it'd escape. It'll go somewhere inside the house. The head is too light and small to be a nuke, but it almost certainly will burn down her whole house.

Juana won't relent.

I suggest we hide in the next room at least, off her launch trajectory, so we can work as a fire brigade afterward. In the flaming ruins.

Best we can do. Juana's got a rocket. She's gonna fire it and we can't stop her now. Counting down. Ten. Nine. Eight...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Rocket: I did get (a small, water-propelled) one as a Christmas present when I was little. I'd forgotten, but an old slide showed it. Though no incendiary warhead...
• The Lee's house: more revelations to come? Few slides of the Lees, though they were a daily presence, our best friends.
• Explosion & fire hazard: I may get sick/inflamed from what my dad's slides show--how he ogled his daughter (and she posed) at 12, and ogled that teen I liked at the beach (who tried to ignore him).
• She'll fire it no matter what: Don't expect my sister to quit playing playing victim. I can't talk it over with her, she'll deny any complicity.
• Juana: isn't named in the raw dream-text, but I think it was her--the littlest Lee, with way more sultry portraits than her big sisters--as if my dad had a thing for her. Too. Along with my sister.
• ACTION: talk about this in therapy, painful though it is. And assume it may trigger inflammation--so eat lightly, drink water, rest up, and quit scanning slides. I can minimize the fallout, but I can't prevent it! Not after this--a military-grade revelation.

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