House of Skin

Dear Eddy,

I’m still after you, so don’t get any ideas you’re off the hook.

True love never dies, my darling. Mine burns ever stronger.

There are things I have to say and I’m afraid I’ll have to tell them to you of all people.

Ready?

I want to tell you about my father. Not my real father who died of pneumonia when I was an infant, but the man my mother married when I was six or seven years old. The man I thought was an angel sent from heaven to guide us and protect us, but was in reality a beast merely biding its time, just waiting to show its teeth and fangs. I want to tell you the truth, not the lies I manufactured for pure hearts. Only the truth.

I loved my stepfather. Please never doubt that. When I was a little girl I loved everything about him. A girl’s father (surrogate father in my lamentable case) is her first love and she compares every other man she meets against him. He was a cop. When I was ten or eleven, he was terminated by the department. I didn’t know why at the time. But I found out later by eavesdropping on conversations between my mother and aunts. He was terminated for his part in a pornography ring. I never learned the particulars. I didn’t want to know them.

That was when my dream of him was shattered as the ideal parent. It only fell apart further, of course, as the years passed. He’d seemed like a good man before then. He was always kind to mother and my younger brother. He always came home bearing gifts and smiles and laughter. We adored him. None of us—not even mother, I think—really knew the beast he truly was deep down.

By the time I was thirteen, my image of him had fallen to memory. Yet, even though I knew he was little better than a common criminal, I still maintained a somewhat idealized view of him. Old habits are hard to break. Why mother stayed with him after that awful pornography business, I’ll never know. Especially since she knew much of it concerned children. Love is blind, I guess.

I had never gotten over the shock of that affair. Much as I wanted to believe he was reformed, I had my doubts. I took to following him as he left for work each evening. He must’ve known, because he usually managed to lose me more than once, abandoning me in one bad neighborhood after the other—which in itself should give you an idea of the sort of man he REALLY was. Mother said he worked for a newspaper, but she never named which one. Maybe she even believed this. I don’t know.

On the eve of my fourteenth birthday, the revelation occurred.

He thought I was sleeping at a friend’s, while in reality I was hiding out waiting for him. I followed him to his place of work. It turned out to be an old, decaying warehouse off of Market. At least that’s what it looked like from the outside. I slipped in there and discovered a very complex business taking place. It had nothing to do with newspapers. Oh, there were makeshift offices set up and people manning phones and desks. It was the scantily clad men and women moving about that raised my suspicions. Most of the men were in their twenties, I thought. The oldest of the women were about the same ages, the youngest no older than I.

I was looking around, being careless, I suppose, when I was caught.

“Hey, kid,” a man said. He was obscenely fat and lecherous-looking.

I was terrified, but I did my best not to show it. “Yeah?” I said.

“You lookin’ for Donny?” he asked, his eyes drinking me in.

I told him I was.

He put his hand on my ass and directed me up a set of stairs. I pretended to like him pawing me, but in reality I wanted to vomit. He left me at the stairs and went about his business.

I was curious by this time, so I went up.

Have you ever been in a movie studio? Well, neither have I. The place I found myself in was a sex factory. Oh, there were sets—torture chambers and dungeons—and cameras and recording equipment, but it was no studio as such. I was looking at things someone my age should never have been exposed to. Yes, I saw it all. And I think this was what destroyed my young mind. This is what pulled the carpet of innocence from beneath me. Not what followed, but this.

I was so shocked by it all. I felt guilty and dirty and damaged beyond repair. I remember backing away, not looking where I was going and not even knowing until I was already there. It was the voices of rage from the film crew that slapped me back into reality… and what reality? I had stumbled onto a live set where they were shooting a B & D film. The eyes of the director and actors were upon me. But they kept filming as someone shoved me out of the way before I stepped into the shot. A girl of my own age was lying on a bed. Her hands were bound, her legs spread wide. A woman in a leather mask was simultaneously whipping her with a leather thong and sliding a strap-on dildo in and out of her ass.

I ran out of there, half out of my mind.

That night, I heard my “father” come home. I expected the worst and I wasn’t disappointed. He slipped into my room. He looked like a stranger.

“Don’t pretend you’re sleeping,” he said.

I opened my eyes.

“Have you told anyone what you saw?”

I shook my head. Words were beyond me.

“They like you down there,” he said. “They want to see more of you.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Business is business.”

To prove this pearl of wisdom, he raped me, then and there, with my mother sleeping only a few doors away. I had been a virgin up until that point. He raped me nightly for weeks. But that was nothing compared to what came next.

I became a star.

Yours,

Cherry