Supposedly lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. It does. Some people say there is no God. There is. I know first hand that there is a God. If there wasn’t, then how could he be laughing at me?
Greetings from Barrow, Alaska; some people call it the ‘Top of the World’. Not really true, as it is 1200 miles from the North Pole. There are places in Canada even closer, but in the good ol’ USA it’s as close as one can get to Santa’s house. I was born here and lived my first thirteen years in this remote Arctic village on Alaska’s northern coast, along with about 4000 other people, three quarters of them Inupiaq Eskimo, and a couple million caribou. The rest of my life has been spent in the lower forty-eight in an unimaginably different world, going to high school in Princeton, New Jersey and then to the vaunted centuries-old Ivy League university perched across the river from my grandparent’s home and finally to a dream job at a Madison Avenue marketing firm. So how did I go from an Eskimo village to Manhattan and why the hell am I back here now? Directly and indirectly, it all springs from my Father.
It started in the summer of ‘67. My mother was an ivory skinned, willowy, blue eyed, raven haired Jewish beauty from an old money New Jersey family, who at the tender age of twenty decided to travel to the Arctic to save the whales by personally ending thousands of years of traditional subsistence culture. She failed. Today traditional whaling is alive and well throughout the circumpolar native communities, but at the time she had no idea as to the immensity of the mountain, crumbling as it might have been, that she was attempting to scale. She spoke to groups of whalers in the coastal villages of the North Slope: Kaktovik, Wainwright, Barrow, Point Lay and Point Hope. In each, the people listened politely to the little white girl, chuckled at her naivety, tried to explain why things were the way they were, and then sent her on to the next village.
In Barrow she met a 37 year-old man named Ezekiel Ahmohoahk, an assistant whaling captain who worked as a civilian handyman at the Naval Arctic Research Lab just outside of town. He was the first person to invite her to dinner during her ill fated “save the whales” trip. They had dinner and talked, each trying to convince the other of the correctness of their view on whaling. They had breakfast, then lunch, and most every meal together for two weeks. The conversations continued and eventually my father won both the argument and my mother’s interest.
The conversations came to cover every subject under the sun. She grew enamored with, as she said ‘the last place in the country where you can live a truly simple life in tune with nature’. Yeah, she was a hippie. As summer waned, the sun finally set for the first time in months. The days were growing shorter and with winter approaching, she chose to stay in the small Eskimo Village rather than return for her junior year at Princeton. Grandma and Grandpa were aghast, but figured when the sun went down, not to return for two months, and the temperatures regularly dipped closer to 80 below zero than to freezing, their little girl would come running home. If she’d told them about her new boyfriend, they surely would have called the Secretary of the Navy to have the sailor boys at NARL rescue their princess from the natives. It took mother almost fifteen years to go home.
Mom and her boyfriend became husband and wife on the spring equinox in 1968, an important day on the hippie calendar. You see, a few months earlier, sometime between the winter solstice, another big hippie holiday, and Christmas a big blizzard hit the top of the world. With 10’ snow drifts and wind chills plunging south of a 100 degrees below zero, it seems mother and father could find nothing else to do but share body heat . . . and bodily fluids.
Mom got knocked up, on the first night of the blizzard according to her, and I got to attend their wedding a scant six months before being born and only a few weeks before she started to show. Grandma and Grandpa Razkowski didn’t attend the ceremony, which in an affront to both her Jewish and his Presbyterian religion, occurred on the still snow-covered beach in front of an old whale skull the size of a VW Beatle, presided over by a non-denominational Navy Chaplin.
Six months later, get this, on the vernal equinox, I came screaming into the world as my mother gave birth at home, tended to by a couple of female elders and my father’s mother, my “Akka”. I was anointed Kianna Celeste Ahmohoahk; Kianna in honor of my father’s Grandmother, and Celeste because as mother saw my conception, her marriage and my birth as being celestially driven.
So, to borrow from Mr. Kubrick, your humble narrator, a half-Jewish / half-Inupiaq advertising executive grew up in a small Eskimo village on the Arctic Ocean, five thousand miles from Manhattan. As far as I knew, life was pretty normal and fun at the top of the world. I learned traditional dances, lots of stories and how to sew animal pelts into coats, mittens and mukluks. I picked up bits of the Inupiaq language from my Akka and other elders; my father couldn’t speak twenty words of his native tongue, having been sent away to a “white man’s” boarding school as a child, as were all of the native children of his generation. I was breastfed until I was five, being weaned only when mom’s belly got too big with my baby brother and I had to start going to kindergarten.
On TV, I got to see glimpses of the world mom left behind. Today Barrow gets every channel everyone else can get via satellite dish, but back then was long before satellite and up in the Arctic there was no cable and certainly nothing to pick up with an antenna; the closest city was some three hundred miles to the south across the mountains of the Brooks Range. We had the “Regional Arctic Television Network”, or RATnet, which consisted of one station that was on the air for six hours a day, unless bad weather kept the delivery plane from coming in with taped programming from the government.
In 1981, with two kids in school and having grown out of her hippie phase, mother went to work part-time for the wildlife department, which brought in some extra money and occasionally kept mom outside the home for a few days at a time as she chased animals across the tundra. Rapidly maturing into a young lady, I enjoyed assuming many of mom’s domestic duties, like cleaning and cooking meals for my father, little brother and me.
Everything changed in the summer of 1981 when the Navy began scaling back operations, leaving my father out of work. He was a proud man whose self-identity was tied to his job; he was his work. He tried to do odd jobs around town to earn money and stay busy, but most people were pretty self-sufficient and many others were now also out of work. We made it though that winter on mom’s paycheck, who was then working full-time, and on our savings.
The next summer, things seemed to look up as father kept busy fishing, hunting and whaling. However, when the snow and darkness came, reality set in; there was little productive for him to do for most of the year. Barrow was a village that was between two worlds. The community held on to some of the traditional ways, but had lost just enough to not truly be in touch with their past any longer. They had embraced many western niceties like snowmobiles, powerboats, central heat and prefab housing, but were far too remote and resistant to be part of mainstream America.
With the money and work gone they numbed the pain with booze. Although alcohol was illegal, there were bootleggers and father started drinking along with many of the now out-of-work men in town. Mom should have done something, but her father was a drunk, although a rich one and her mother had always told her that good wives did not interfere and that they politely looked the other way; so she did.
Thanksgiving was only a week away and I was a couple of months past my 13th birthday when father staggered into my room late one night while mom was in Fairbanks at a waterfowl symposium. I’d quickly learned to not anger him when he drank. He always apologized when he sobered up, but he did tend to hit when he was drunk and angry. At least he had some twisted sense of chivalry – mom and I got open handed slaps while fists were reserved for men . . . and little brothers.
He stood over me and growled that he had “. . . done nothing but give, give, give and give since your mother came up here and latched onto me by getting herself knocked up” and that it was “time you tunnik women gave something back to us natives”. I had never heard him talk like that. The words were crushing and my eyes welled with tears. Tunnik was a racial slur used by some Eskimos to refer to white people. It was a word I had heard spoken behind my mother’s back, but had never heard directed at me.
I had always considered myself more Eskimo than white. The only extended family I knew was Inupiaq and I had grown up immersed in the fading remnants of the traditional culture. When I thought about it later I recalled the times he used to joke about how I was “technically only 7/16 Eskimo” because his grandfather had been one of the first white men in Barrow; part of a British naval search and rescue ship around the time of the US Civil War. At that moment though, there was no humor in his tone. He was dead serious. Perhaps he’d always thought of his own little girl as an outsider, a half-breed. The truth? I’ll never know.
“Give me your PJs” he snapped.
I just stared at him, the demand not registering.
He balled his hand into a fist and lifted it in a menacing manner. “Now Celeste!” he snapped. “Take off your god damn pajamas!”
He stayed his hand, but the name stung like a slap to my face. It was my “white” name, and nobody but my mother ever used it. I had no clue what he wanted with my pajamas, but realizing the threat was not empty, I pulled the covers up to my neck and slipped off my blue Smurfs pajamas and handed them to him. The warm flannel of the sheets caressed my naked flesh, providing some measure of comfort in the uncomfortable situation.
He gazed at the PJs for a long moment before dropping them on the floor. “Good. Now the covers,” he ordered in a throaty growl.
My heart leaped into my throat and I froze, the reality of his request seizing my mind.
The fist rose again, but defiant, I shook my head.
“Little tunnik bitch,” he shouted. “I am your father, Celeste! You will do what I say, whenever I say! Now, get rid of the fucking blankets!”
I jumped at the harshness and volume of the demand, throwing off my blankets in reflex. I lay stiff as a board, my pale flesh (by Eskimo standards anyway) illuminated by the yellowish glow of a nearby street light. My father smiled, surveying my still developing body from head to toe. I had come to hate my nipples – still do. They’re very dark and as thick and long as the last segment of my pinky finger. I even tried wearing double bras, but no matter what top or dress I wore there were always noticeable bumps atop my bumps. The wonders of modern brazier technology have helped, but they’re still a pain in the ass.
The cool air in my room needled my flesh, raising goose bumps and further stiffening my already too thick nips. Father grinned at the effect, misinterpreting the cause. “Damn girl, those titties have gotta be bigger than your mother’s, but just like ‘em – they sure love attention. Hers always stand right up when they get out from under her shirt and see me.” Although my breasts were pretty developed for my age, I didn’t appreciate the comment, or the suggestion.
He knelt beside my bed. My heart raced, not knowing what was happening or what was going to happen. He reached out, and with a sweaty, trembling hand, cupped my left breast, giving it a gentle squeeze. I tried to say something, but only a squeak came past the lump in my throat. My mind screamed to jump out of bed and run, but my body lay paralyzed and mute. His hands began to explore my body, kneading both breasts and toying with my maddeningly hard nipples, palms rubbing down my belly, along my narrow hips and down my rigid legs. He massaged my feet for a minute before running his hands back up my legs. As his hands rose toward my waist, they began to press outward on my thighs, spreading them as he went and exposing my peach fuzz covered mound to the air and his sight. I could only stare at the CHiPs poster on my ceiling, wishing Officer Poncherello would come to life and rescue me.
I felt fingers stroking the wispy curls between my legs; gently petting my mound like one would a tiny kitten. Periodically a finger would trace the line between the lips that guarded my opening. Although this was long before the Internet and I had no access to any porn, I’d discovered the good feelings that came from the place my father was now stroking, and while I may have been naive by city standards, girls talk and I knew what parts boys and girls had how they went together.
Often, I had imagined Eric Estrada carrying me away to his Hollywood mansion on his motorcycle, marrying me and us doing all the things that led to lots of babies. My pillow had substituted many-a-night for Eric as well as other celebrities and even a couple of local boys. Never had it served as a surrogate for my father and the twisting in my gut screamed that what he was doing was wrong.
Still, I’d never actually heard anything that fathers and daughters shouldn’t do such things, and I did know of a girl who was in 9th grade that had gotten pregnant. Secretly she’d told us it was by her father, but her family said it was a boy in Kotzebue. Such things happened in the Arctic. Everyone knew, but it was considered impolite to speak of it.
His stroking continued for what seemed like hours. Boredom crept in and eventually my eyes started to droop as my body tried to return to sleep. I began to relax and my mind wandered in a semi-dream state, forgetting that my father was even in the room. Warmth flowed through my body from that magical place between my legs, causing my hips to wiggle and rise off the mattress. My breathing quickened and whimpers of pleasure escaped my lips as I envisioned Rick Springfield trying to ‘Carry me Away’, working his magic between my legs. An orgasm greater than any I’d ever felt crashed over me, smothering me in its rapturous embrace and imparting a spin to the room that made my head swim. I’d given myself many, many nice little orgasms, but nothing ever as intense or satiating as what had just transpired.
“Good girl. You’re a natural, just like your mother.”
I had been basking beside Rick in the warmth of the tropical sun on a white sand Tahitian beach when father’s gravelly voice ripped the fantasy away. My eyes flew open to the cold, dimly lit room and my father kneeling beside me. He stood and sucked my glistening moisture off his finger with an audible “ummmmmm” as if it had been covered in chocolate. “I thought you’d enjoy that Kianna, now go to sleep . . . and not a word of this to your mother. She said she wanted to wait until you were ‘mature’ to show you this. She doesn’t understand that you are already mature, more so than other girls your age. I know you’re not a little girl anymore. You’re a young woman, but I don’t want you to get in trouble. So for now, it’ll be our secret. Okay?”
He paused, waiting for a response.
I simply nodded and forced a smile.
“Alright then. Goodnight sweetie.”
With that he left the room, closing the door behind him. I just lay there for a while, not knowing what to do or what to think. The cold in my room finally coaxed me to slip back into my PJs and under the covers. It took awhile to fall asleep, the thoughts racing through my mind fending off slumber.
In the years since, I’ve read a lot on the subject of incest; about the shame, the horror, the disgust its victims feel. Strangely, at the time I felt none of that. Once the fear had been smothered beneath my fantasy, the things my father was doing had felt great; better than anything I’d felt before. I wasn’t sure what he had meant by my “being a natural” but I secretly agreed with him about my being more mature than mom would admit. I chalked the “tunnik” comments up to the alcohol and since I didn’t want to get in trouble with mom, I decided to keep quiet.
Mom returned the next day and Father didn’t say a word about what had happened. Life went on as usual and looking back, I realize that I was strutting a bit, somehow feeling on equal footing with mom as the woman of the house. I was such an idiot. Two weeks later, mom was gone on another overnight trip to Wainwright to check on some polar bear sightings.
I was lying in bed, pillow between my legs, enjoying a mind-blowing romp through my imagination. I lay on a big red velvet sedan chair, fanned by Egyptian musclemen as I floated down the Nile beside Indiana Jones, who fed me grapes with one hand while exploring my jungle for buried treasure. Oh, and did he ever find it.
Basking in the warmth of his attention, I must have fallen asleep. My eyes fluttered open under the harsh light of the hallway fixture my father had stolen from the little used Air Force hanger. I squinted and then something blocked the light. I rubbed my eyes and opened them, looking up to see my father standing over me. “Daddy?”
“Waiting for me, eh?” The smell of bootleg whiskey descended on me, thick as a winter ice fog.
I nodded, not knowing what to say, but figuring it was the response he wanted.
“Good. So do you wanna learn more stuff about being a woman?”
Part of me was curious, but I didn’t like him being drunk and I preferred that it be with just about anyone else. “Dad . . . I’m kind of tired.”
“Nonsense,” he grumbled. “Get naked.”
“Dad, can’t we just . . .”
His hand balled into a fist. “God damn it Celeste, don’t you dare tempt me and then pull it back. You offer a fish to Nanook and then yank it away, you anger the bear. He will kill you and still eat the fish. Don’t make me hurt you. You’ve been tempting me for a long time girl. You can enjoy it along with me if you want, but one way or another I will have what you’ve been dangling in front of me.”
I had no idea what I had ‘been dangling’ or with what I had tempted him, but I understood the threat. I pulled off my boy’s A-Team pajamas (given to us by a charity), dropped them on the floor, pulled my blanket to the side and lay, again, naked and stiff in the chilly room.
My father nodded with approval. “Tonight, you learn what women are for. I think your bitch of a tunnik mother has forgotten, but you’re old enough to learn.” He sat on the bed beside me. “It’s her fault things are like this, Kianna. Her parents have more money than the entire village, but do they share in our time of need? No. They don’t care about us natives. They never even come to see their grandkids. Let her go back to mommy and daddy. Fuck them and fuck her.”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Before he lost his job he seemed to be so in love with my mother, and she equally in love with him. Things had changed but I had always believed it only temporary.
He put his hand on my bare leg. “But it will be ok because I got you and you can do anything she can . . . and more. You know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because you got native blood in you girl and that makes you strong. You understand what it means to respect your elders, to carry on our traditions, to care for your men and to do what you’re told.”
His hand ran up my leg, stopping just below my waist where his fingers began to play with the thin, dark triangle of curls a few inches below my ‘innie’ belly button. I just closed my eyes, expecting a replay of the previous time. I waited for more to happen, but he did nothing but run his fingers through my pubic hair for a couple of minutes.
I opened my eyes when he got up off the bed. He walked over to the bedroom door and closed it. I could hear rustling, as if he was looking through the clothes in my dresser, but I couldn’t see him in the dark. When he approached a minute later, my eyes had begun to adjust and I could see that he was naked. I had never seen him, or any male naked, but I’d seen drawings in health class and recognized the “erect penis” pointed at me. I can still see it in my memory, but given my experience, it’s now kind of comical.
Without a word, he crawled onto the bed at my feet, pushed apart my legs and lay down between them, scooting up until his hands were on my thighs and his face hovered over my mound. I had no idea what he was doing.
His fingers found the crease beneath the curls and pulled the sides apart to reveal the pink beneath. I craned my neck to see, curious about what he was doing. When his tongue flicked my “button” I nearly jumped off the bed. I hadn’t known what to expect, but it sure as hell was not that! His hands gripped my waist and help me in place as his tongue began to lap at the delicate flesh, from the nub at the top to the opening at the bottom.
I wanted to close my eyes, but they refused and stared wide at the ceiling while my fingers clutched the fabric of the sheet beneath me. He licked me like the sled dogs licked fresh bones. While it felt really weird, it was beginning to stir a flutter in my belly and I couldn’t hold still as my breathing grew rapid and heavy. Just as I could feel the fireworks approaching, he stopped. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but instinct focused my thoughts to only one purpose. Disappointment drove a whimper of frustration from my throat. A moment later, when he rose up onto his knees, my bent legs fell to the sides. Accepting the invitation, he scooted up further toward me, slipping his hands behind my parted knees and lifting them up with him.
I knew how sex worked and now knew what my father had in mind as his erection bumped into my very wet and very aroused womanhood. He said nothing. No assurances, no warnings, no sermon about my becoming a woman. It just happened.
The skillful hunter took aim at his prey, and with a single thrust buried his whaler’s harpoon in her tender flesh. The promise of fireworks was ripped away, replaced by the searing sting that accompanied the entry of the father’s manhood into his daughter’s most intimate place. A girl deserves better for her first time.
He didn’t stop; didn’t ask if I was ok. It hurt and I whimpered, but fear whispered in my ear that crying or asking him to quit would end up hurting far worse . . . and the bear would still get his fish. So I lay there and did what I thought was my duty as an Inuit woman.
The pain subsided and the fullness moving within me began to hint that perhaps being a woman might not be too bad after all. My hips started to wiggle, guiding him to increasingly rewarding places. I returned to the place I’d been when he stopped licking me. My breathing was ragged, beads of perspiration dotted my flesh and my stomach darted in all directions like lemmings when you found them in a cabinet. Just as my reward seemed near, again he stopped. I wanted to scream in frustration.
This time, he was making little grunts, gurgles and groans while pressing himself into me with all his wiry might as he began to shake, shudder and grunt. He was jerking around like the teacher who collapsed a couple weeks before Christmas in an epileptic seizure during my history class. It was freaking me out and ruined any hope I had of getting my fireworks. Three long grunts later he pulled out of and away from me, stood, patted my leg and said “good girl” before leaving my room.
That was it. Once again I was alone with Eric Estrada, who looked down on me from my ceiling. I glanced at the Mickey Mouse clock on my wall. From when my father’s tongue had touched me until he closed my bedroom door behind him only eleven minutes had passed. It had seemed like eleven hours.
As the good feelings faded, the pain returned, though now as a dull ache deep inside and as my fingers discovered, a raw tenderness on the outside. From the sides of my thighs to the dark curls between them and all throughout the pink beneath them I was gooey and sticky, as was my sheet. Whatever he had done, it was messy. An hour later I was showered and asleep on a bed made up with clean white sheets that inches from my face read “Property of the United States Navy”.
And so went the winter of 1981-82. My mother and father rarely spoke pleasantly and argued often. She spent increasing amounts of time traveling for the Wildlife Department and he spent increasing amounts in my bed, periodically choosing to stay and sleep beside me when he’d finished using me. I’ll be vilified in the incest survivor’s community for saying this, but honestly, although I didn’t like the circumstances, most of the time I did enjoy what we did. On a purely physical level, sex feels incredible. We’re designed to enjoy ourselves, and I did. I didn’t know any better.
I lost track of how many times he fucked me. That’s all it was; fucking. He never kissed me – thank God. There was no tenderness. In retrospect, it was all somewhat mechanical and he was a lousy lover.
In March, a week before Easter, mom took me and my brother to the A.C. (Alaska Commercial for those non-locals) for groceries. Taking us along was something she had done when we were younger, but which she stopped doing for some reason when my dad lost his job. We hopped in the Department of Wildlife pickup truck and drove to the store . . . and right past it. We hung a right at the Utqiagvik Presbyterian Church and sped down the road to the one gate Wiley Post Airport where an old Reeves Air four propeller airliner waited on the runway – the only paved area in all of Barrow. She parked the truck out front, left the keys in the ignition, took us into the airport, out to the runway and up into the plane. It was my first time on an airplane and my last time seeing Barrow until I returned for the days leading up to my Father’s funeral.
Princeton, New Jersey was another world. I might as well have been on Mars. Some people were black. The few were brown people there were spoke Spanish. Most people in Princeton were white, just like everyone in my mother’s family, and that alone took some getting used to. Living with money in mainstream America brought all sorts of wonders I never had in Barrow, including twenty TV channels, movie theaters, fast food, shopping malls, freeways and beaches with water warm enough for a swim. It was culture shock of the first degree and after only ten days on the ground I was in the Princeton Academy for Girls for the final two months of 7th grade. I was an outsider in so many ways. I knew it. The other girls knew it. It was pure hell, but June brought the end of school and with it my first summer in “civilization”.
We went to the Hamptons for the 4th of July weekend. I didn’t like how my body was looking and really had no interest in putting on a swim suit, but mom insisted and I eventually capitulated. The next morning we were at the doctor’s office.
When the doctor announced that I was pregnant my mom actually fainted. I thought it was something that only occurred in the movies, but I guess if you’re going to do it, a doctor’s office is about the best place to drop. She told her parents that night. The new family flipped out. When they found out by whom, things really got out of hand. It was the first and only time I ever heard Grandpa Irving use the F-word when he referred to my father as a “fucking monster”. Grandma and Grandpa wanted to get the FBI involved, but my mother pleaded to just let us leave “that world” behind. They did. We learned that I was 26 weeks along and while my mother was upset that I’d been hiding the growing bump in my belly, given the circumstances she let it go.
To avoid scandal, we went on “vacation” to the French countryside for the rest of the summer. I went into labor about seven weeks early, on August 20th. A month before turning fourteen I was mother to a five pound boy I named Robert in honor of the lead singer of my then favorite band, The Cure. Without anyone’s knowledge, the next day I wrote my father a letter and had a nurse mail it for me. It was short and simply said “Dear Dad – I had a baby yesterday. His name is Robert. He is your son. I miss Barrow, but mom says we’re never going back. I just thought you should know. I love you – Kianna.” Despite everything, he had always been my father and most everything about that was good, and I still loved him the way a daughter should love her father and I always would.
Two weeks later I was back in Princeton starting the first day of eighth grade - alone. With Robert in the ICU, mother stayed behind in France to help care for him. I cried the entire seven hour flight home.
After three weeks of school, I had yet to smile or wear anything besides black. However, the day after my birthday I wore a pink sweater to school. My outlook changed when I awoke the morning of my 14th birthday to the sound of a baby crying, a sound I’d heard many times in my dreams the previous few weeks. This time, it continued even after I opened my eyes. Lying beside me, cradled in my arm was my darling, squirming baby. “Happy birthday Celeste” my mother cooed, grinning ear to ear. They’d flown in the night before just to surprise me. I guess instinct is strong. Seeing my child for the first time outside the hospital was the best gift I had ever received; still is. I got to stay home from school that day.
The official story was that Mom was pregnant when she had left her abusive husband and had given birth in France. From then on, mother would raise my son as her own and I would simply be his adoring big sister, which in reality I was as well
Eventually, I assimilated into the upper crust of New Jersey society. By 10th grade I was fitting-in nicely at school. I was playing field hockey and on the swim team, had a good number of friends and was hanging out at the mall on a regular basis like every other teen girl. I went on to attend Princeton, where my grandparents and mother had all gone, and graduate cum laude with a double major in Marketing and Finance. By age twenty-four I was working as a senior account executive for the Madison Avenue marketing firm of Feingold & Grantham, on whose board of directors sat my grandfather’s best friend. By the time I hit twenty-seven I was running their media product placement division and earning a solid six figures.
I had also never married, and was by day a ruthless, all business ‘Ice Queen’ who at night lived for the club scene and jumped from one guy or girl’s bed to another. I loved fucking and working equally. I wanted to fall in love, but rarely felt anything for anyone and despite my intentions usually ended up just using them for my own selfish purposes.
For a time I think I was in love. It was an incredibly dysfunctional relationship that I can’t imagine would ever last, but still wish it could have. I was a twenty-eight year-old corporate rising star and she was Megan: a barely eighteen year-old high school dropout from Seattle who played bass for an all-girl grunge band that, blissfully ignorant, had come to New York to find fame and fortune. I made a quarter-million the year before we met; she had thirty seven dollars and forty eight cents to her name the day we met; I worked all day, she slept all day; I was a political conservative, she a liberal; I thought doing the Macarena was fun, she thought it was just plain wrong. We had so little in common, but in the 287 days we were together, that little was more than all my other relationships had offered put together. The sex was incredible and the quiet dinners talking about meaningless shit even more so; and the look on my mother’s face when I brought Megan to the Passover Seder at my grandparent’s house – priceless.
Megan was a kind, giving and trusting soul; things I wanted to be and things which I now wish she hadn’t been. On a blistering hot Saturday afternoon, July 12, 1997 at 1:37 p.m. to be exact, I gave Megan a kiss goodbye as she dropped me at the office and headed off to play a music festival in Battery Park. I should have gone, but made my priority to finish the contract that would put Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in an episode of Friends. That night she told her band mates she was giving a fan a ride home. She didn’t come home that night or the next. I was a frantic wreck.
The third day they found her nude, raped, and strangled body floating in the Hudson. I wanted so much to join her; actually tried, but had made the mistake of giving my mom a key to my apartment. She found me beside the empty pill bottle not an hour after I’d swallowed thirty codeine and promised Megan that I’d find her in the darkness. I got out of the hospital in time for Megan’s funeral back in Seattle. My mom was pretty cool about her daughter being a part-time dyke, even sitting Shiva with me the following week. Thirteen days after the last time my lips touched Megan’s, I was back at work and focused on nothing but my job and family.
Other than some asthma from being born premature with underdeveloped lungs, Robert was happy, healthy, handsome and active. For fifteen years I watched him grow up as nothing more than my brother. Ok, technically we shared the same father so we actually were brother and sister, but you know what I mean. We never told him that the woman he called ‘mom’ was his grandmother and that I was not only ‘big sister’, but the one who brought him into the world. I was a doting ‘sister’ and even after going off to college and work, made a point of seeing him most every week. He may have been almost 2/3 Inupiaq by blood, but he knew nothing of his heritage and although a bit shy was your typical 1990’s skate boarding, video game playing teen.
Things changed just before December of 1997. As long as I could remember my father smoked – a lot; had to be a couple packs a day. Most Eskimo men do. After returning from a Black Friday shopping trip to The City the day after Thanksgiving – never could resist a sale no matter how large the crowd – a letter addressed to me and postmarked Barrow, Alaska was waiting for at my mother’s house; yeah, an honest to goodness pen and paper letter. I hadn’t written one since the day after Robert had been born and could never remember having received one. My 81 year old Akka was writing to tell me that in the spring Father had been diagnosed with advanced lung and liver cancer, and that things had taken a bad turn and he was not expected to live much past Christmas.
My mother and brother refused to go see him. I should have too, but something gnawed at me every night when I tried to sleep. I wanted to cry, but couldn’t; actually, I never really did cry - ever. I didn’t know why, but I had to go and I needed my son to go with me. My mother nearly came unglued when I told her (I didn’t ask) that Robert was coming with me. We yelled, screamed and fought for the first time ever. I was in full bitch mode. Two nights later Robert and I were on a flight for Alaska.
He thought it was cool that he was finally going to meet his father and see the land of his ancestors. Life in Alaska was a subject we always avoided, but with 13 hours of flights and layovers, Robert and I had lots of time to kill and with Barrow our destination, that’s where the conversation turned. He had lots of questions mother would never answer, and which I found myself happy to discuss. By the time we reached Anchorage and started to see people who kind of looked like Robert and me, some dressed in traditional native coats, I realized I was homesick.
After a four hour weather delay in Fairbanks, the 737 touched down in Barrow a little past midnight, not that it mattered much as far as daylight goes; the sun wouldn’t rise again until the end of January. Although it was almost the twenty first century, it was still the Arctic and no automated jet ways came out to the airplane. Everyone walked down stairs that folded down from the airplane and walked across the tarmac to the same terminal I had left in 1982. The cold had never bothered me growing up, but my blood had thinned in New York and the eighty below wind chill was like a punch in the gut as I exited the plane, but a strangely refreshing one nonetheless.
Our bags were off loaded from the bucket of a bulldozer and tossed down a metal ramp to waiting passengers– not quite JFK, LaGuardia or Newark. We grabbed a cab driven by a Russian immigrant, paid the five bucks it took to get anywhere in town and rode the three minutes to the same house, on the west side of Old Barrow, where I grew up. It seemed much smaller now and the years had taken their toll.
As Robert and I stood at the cunnychuck door, my heart was pounding and a lump had taken residence in my throat, just above the leather thong necklace that bore a scrimshaw carved in walrus ivory on which beamed the face of a smiling native girl in a sunshine ruff parka. My father had worked on it for a year before giving it to me for my 10th birthday. I hadn’t worn it since 9th grade.
“Aren’t you gunna knock?” Robert asked. “I’m freezing.”
I shook my head. “No. You do it.”
He chucked. “Coming here sure is making you act weird”. He stepped up and knocked on the unpainted door. A minute passed with no response. “You think he’s asleep?”
Just as I was considering hiking over to the Top of the World hotel and Robert was raising his hand to knock again, the door opened to reveal a small, leather skinned man with grey hair and tubes running from his nose to an oxygen bottle on a small aluminum cart. He smiled and those dark eyes surrounded by bloodshot yellow lit up like those of a boy on Christmas morning and welled up with tears. “Kianna . . .” His voice was a hoarse and gravelly forced whisper. “I have missed you so, so very much. Welcome home baby.” My own eyes filled with tears that blurred my vision and spilled over to run down each cheek. I pushed aside the lump in my throat. “I’ve missed you too daddy.”
It was so strange. When I was growing up, my father always seemed larger than life, but that day it was I who stood a half-head taller, especially in my completely impractical spike heeled knee high Prada boots. He looked over at his shivering son, nodded with a smile and retreated into the house from the coat, boot and outdoor gear strewn entry. Robert and I followed.
Without thinking about it, I took off my shoes before entering, as was the custom and as if I had never left. Robert watched and did the same before following me into the living room. Thankfully, the house was much warmer than outside, but it was still surprisingly chilly and like the outside, much smaller than in my memory.
He turned to Robert, who was almost as tall as I, and put out his hand. “Hello son.” Robert took it and shook hands, looking like he didn’t know what else to do or say. “I’m sorry we haven’t met until now, but I’m honored to have a young man such as you for my son. I would have come to see you both, but your grandmother forbid it and I respected her wishes. But I am so happy to see you and your mother now, before . . .”
Shit. I winced.
Robert eyes shot to me, bewildered.
“. . . well, before . . . you know.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette and lighter. “Oh, let me give you one piece of fatherly advice, son. Don’t smoke,” he chucked. “These things will kill you.” He sat down, flicked the lighter then let it go out. “Oops, forgot to turn off the air. My nurse said I could blow up the house by lighting up with it on.” He turned to me, “Your mother would be really pissed if I blew you two up, eh?” He shut off his oxygen, lit up the filterless Marlboro and took a long drag as he motioned to the empty loveseat from where I’d watched countless Saturday morning cartoons. “Please, this is your home too. Sit. Both of you.”
I could see the wheels turning in Robert’s head, and didn’t really want to have that conversation at one o’clock in the morning after over sixteen hours of travel and without having discussed with my father if it should even be discussed. I looked at my watch. “Actually, it is really late and we’ve been flying all day. You mind if we hit the sack and chat over breakfast?”
He looked at his watch, the cheap one the Navy had given him when they kicked him to the curb. “Sorry. Of course. Go ahead and use your old bedroom. It’s only got the one bed, but I’ve laid out a sleeping bag on the floor for the boy.” He looked at Robert. “Or you can sleep on the couch if you like, but I think you’re a bit too tall for it. Your mother used to sleep on it when . . . “
I cut him off. “Dad, we’ll talk in the morning.” I grabbed my and Robert’s bags and headed down the hall to my old room. Robert shrugged, waved goodnight and followed.
With a shove of my shoulder, the creaky door popped open. Little had changed. A couple of storage boxes lined the wall, but the rest was all mine from fifteen years earlier, including a very faded Eric Estrada looking down on the musty blankets covering my twin bed. Three Cabbage Patch dolls, covered in dust and sun bleached of color sat atop a US Navy dresser. Frost lined the inside of the window and spots of the exterior wall. Although my breath was visible in the room, it was the one area that did not reek of cigarettes. It was a smell I’d come to loathe and one that had Robert already reaching for his inhaler. I shut the door behind us to seal out the odor and turned to my son. “Looks like this is the only safe room in the house, eh?”
Robert stifled a shiver. “Yeah, but its butt cold in here. Was it always like this?”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember it being this way. My guess is that with his health he’s let the place go and the heat probably doesn’t work right. Tomorrow, we’ll go get a couple of rooms at the Top of the World, for the warmth and some fresh air, so don’t bother unpacking. Sleeping bag okay for tonight?”
He shrugged. “I suppose.”
Robert crawled into the sleeping bag in his basketball sweats and sweatshirt, while I slipped under the pile of forty year-old blankets on my old bed dressed in a mock-turtleneck and black jeans.
A half hour later I was still awake; a mummy entombed in a musty mass of hand-stitched floral prints. Before I’d left Alaska I had stopped wearing pajamas or anything else to bed. I loved being nude. The couple of times I was forced to wear something, while sharing a hotel room with my mom, cousin or friends, I had been painfully aware of being dressed. I pondered my situation.
“Robert?” I whispered.
No response.
“Robert?” I hissed, this time a bit louder.
Again, no response.
Confident that he was asleep and desperate to be there myself, I popped a valium from my purse and stripped off my clothes under the blankets, piling them on the night stand. Minutes later I was dreaming the night away . . . and the dream was nice.
I was lying nude on a secluded beach in Fiji, one where I’d been a couple of times. The sun was so intense that it stung my skin, but being one to enjoy a bit of pain now and then, I didn’t mind. Lying beside me, massaging hot oil into my breasts and belly was Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee; no complaints there. My body was definitely enjoying the exploration by those gifted hands – curious hands roaming across my stomach, circling my navel, wandering up to tracing the curve of each breast and toy with each thick and responsive nipple. Nipple play has always been one surefire way to get my motor running and grease the skids for more intimate action. Tommy definitely had the engine running, but to my annoyance pulled away when, not twenty feet away, this damn black and white malamute started barking its fool head off.
Seven or eight yips later it thankfully stopped and Tommy resumed his voyage across my flesh. Each palm cupped a breast, sending a shiver throughout my body. For a moment he just grinned, keeping his hands in place. Eager for more I covered his hands with mine and pulled them lower, across my abdomen to the wispy triangle between my legs.
Once again Rover interrupted; a single bark that caused Tommy’s hands to jump away. I wanted to muzzle that mutt. You ever have one of those dreams that is so great you don’t want to wake up? You’re awake just enough to know you’re dreaming, but still sleepy enough to believe the dream and cling to it.
“Stay baby,” I urged. “I have a lot more to offer than that pumped up blonde bimbo Pamela”. I think ‘Kianna Lee’ has a nice ring to it, don’t you? On second thought, maybe not; it sounds like an Asian porn star. Eager for continued attention, I pressed Tommy’s hands back onto my mound and gave him some verbal encouragement. Trembling fingers moved ever so slightly; not nearly aggressive enough for my tastes, so I laced my long, thin fingers between his and gave him the grand tour: tight, firm circles on my embarrassingly large but oh-so rewarding nub; long, downward strokes through my damp, pink cleft; fingertip in to tease my now sopping entrance.
He leaned closer with the most charming smile I’d ever seen. I did not want to wake up to find only a pillow between my legs. Dream or not I wanted my release in his arms. I pulled him to me with what little grace Prince Valium would allow, guided his rugged face to mine and planted a sloppy kiss on those incredible lips. He returned the kiss with equally sloppy passion and vigor. What Tommy lacked in style he made up for in effort. We made out for a minute, maybe more, but the tendrils of valium induced slumber were lifting like the morning mist and I grew impatient. I grabbed my celebrity by the shoulders and rolled him onto his back. With a shove to his loose swim trunks, I freed his already firm member, savoring its immense pulsing heat in my palm. I’d seen the video and wanted to give that monster a ride. Like a cat in heat I was on it, slipping all of his manhood within a passage bereft of male attention since the weekend before I’d met Megan.
I rode Pamela’s man for all I was worth, and it was magnificent. He didn’t do much, but it was my dream and he didn’t need to. He toyed with my breasts and spread kisses to any of my flesh that neared his lips. He was adorable and let me just get what I needed from him. When the rising tide took me up and over the waterfall, I pulled him over with me. He looked scared, attached to a screaming banshee of a lover, shuddering as his body made its offering within me. Even in the stinging summer sun, I could feel his heat fill me. I rolled off him, gave him another kiss and curled up beside my new man. I didn’t wake up. Quite the contrary, slumber embraced me with the best night of sleep I’d had in that house since I was a suckling babe on my mother’s chest.
The grating of steel on frozen gravel from the snow plow outside my window shoved my eyelids open. The smell of fish assailed my refined nostrils. Bleary eyes surveyed my old room. Above me, Eric Estrada, faded and wrinkled, smiled down on me. To my left, on the floor, Robert’s sleeping bag was open and empty. I sat up. As the covers slid down, the cold bit my unusually tender nipples and brought them to an uncomfortable stiffness. Then I saw Robert’s Sony Handycam on the dresser, lens open and pointed at me. Cute. The little perv was trying to get some naked footage of his sister.
Shivering in the room’s cold, I snatched the camcorder from its perch and buried myself under my blankets. In the dark of my cotton burrow I rewound the tape, opened the flip-out screen and hit play. The first shot was on the air plane, taking off from Fairbanks; I fast-forwarded. The second clip was taken in the back of the cab on the way from the airport to my Dad’s house, looking around town; I zoomed ahead. A flash of static led me into the third video.
It was my room, dark but illuminated in the soft green of ‘night vision’. The time stamp showed it was filmed a little over seven hours earlier. I kept watching. The full length of my bed came in to view as the curtains were opened a couple of inches, allowing the street light to add an amber hue to the lime-scape. I watched as my son stepped into the picture and peeled back my covers, exposing my nude, sleeping form. He turned to the camera, grinned, gave two thumbs up as he whispered “score!” That boy was so dead. From how much I’d rewound, I knew a lot more remained. Curious, I continued watching.
His hand reached out to touch the sleeping breast, and when its owner did not stir, to play with it a bit. His fingertips brushed the gentle curve and swirled around the Hershey’s Kiss like nipple. His mouth hung open, eyes transfixed on the serindipidous prize. As I watched my face grew warm and my heart quickened its beat. On the tape, a dog barked, causing him to jerk his hands away and in real-time, me to nearly drop the camcorder. A lump rose into my throat. When the barking stopped, his hands returned to my breasts and their stiff nubs atop them. I watched as I gave a little groan and grabbed his hands. He froze, glancing at the camera, glowing eyes wide with a ‘busted’, deer-in-the-headlights look . . . until my hands pulled his down my stomach, down to the dark patch between my legs. Lips dry, I adjusted the view screen and tried to swallow the lump in my throat; it wouldn’t budge.
The neighbor’s dog barked once again. From my dream I knew it was coming, but still chuckled when he jumped. “Stay,” I groaned on tape, yanking his hands back between my legs as I mumbled something that sounded like “Iva lawfer pumpa bimbala”. I saw my hand grind his into my needy mound, guiding it to all those special places. On the video, a sound like the squish of a wet sponge elicited a long, throaty coo – a sound I knew from my own home brewed porn that I made only when really enjoying myself and about to take things to another level. I knew what was about to happen, yet I could not stop; I had to see.
The tiny screen showed me pulling my son to me in the green and orange light, pulling his quivering lips to mine. I kissed him like a hot, drunken one night stand. He kissed me like a first girlfriend. With a grunt of frustration, the me from two a.m. grabbed his neck, pushed him onto his back and with eyes closed shoved herself onto his slender manhood. I rode him with an aggression I’d never shown. I’d always been submissive in bed and had never taken such overt control, even with my shy, eighteen year-old Megan.
It was horrible. It was erotic. My mind sundered beneath a thousand conflicting emotions and memories, yet I continued watching until he shuddered and grunted beneath my convulsing, whimpering gasps. I closed the screen, shut-off the camera and sat up, emerging from the blankets. The lump lay bloated in my throat and my vision blurred as tears roileded in each eye, threatening to boil over onto my cheeks.
“Kianna, breakfast!” Robert’s shout from the living room slapped me from my fugue. With thumb and finger, I wiped the moisture from my eyes then grabbed my camcorder from my suitcase. I ejected the evidence of the night’s shameful events Robert’s camera and switched it with the still blank cassette from mine, and returned camera to the dresser where I’d found it. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I didn’t want him having proof of what we had done.
I threw on my clothes, stuffed my palmcorder into the oversized hood of the parka hanging on the back of my door, and joined my father and our son for a breakfast of whitefish and scrambled eggs. Robert couldn’t look at me and my father had little to say, as had always been the case until he’d had his two cups of coffee and three morning cigarettes. I played dumb, ate quickly and excused myself for a parka bundled walk to clear the cobwebs from my head.
Even though it was almost 11 a.m., it was dark and bitter cold; the sun wouldn’t provide any warmth for weeks. I pulled out the camera and buried my head in the warmth of the immense hand sewn sun ruff. I hadn’t realized the coat had been my mothers until I put it on; even after fifteen years her scent was still strong on it. Head down, I walked along the gravel beach, taunted by the voice of recrimination over one shoulder and self deprecation over the other.
What a horrible mother I was to have let it happen at all.
How disgraceful it was that I had practically raped my own son
How mortifying that the boy I’d taken within me was also my father’s son.
And what a humiliating irony it was that it had all happened in the very bed where he was conceived as my father raped me.
I stopped. Those voices had been denigrating and belittling me for over half my life and I was sick of it. I hurled the thousand-dollar camcorder into a snow bank and screamed “shut the fuck up,” into the incessant polar wind. I closed my eyes, took a sharp, icy breath.
I braced for the expected rebuke from my inner demons . . . but heard only the hiss of ice crystals blowing along the road. I opened my eyes realized I was alone in my head for the first time in ages. A smile snuck across my lips.
I pulled back my hood and raced to the snow bank, reaching into the hole that held my camera. Thankfully, snow is soft and while covered in white, the camcorder was undamaged. I popped open screen, rewound and started the video over. Continuing my walk, I watched it all, but this time through new eyes. I watched myself flip Robert onto his back, and pinning his wrists, wiggle my way onto stiffness I had inspired. I could blame the valium and I could blame him for having the nerve to peek at my breasts, but the truth was that I was the aggressor. I wanted it, but didn’t realize from whom I was getting it. He wanted it, but didn’t he had just returned to the flesh that had borne him. It no way was it like what had happened in that same bed so many years before.
I found myself grinning. What had just occured was really fucked up, but I’d apparently given my son a most memorable and fulfilling first time and got my rocks off; a feat not many women get from a virgin. I chuckled to myself, realizing that it was the first time I’d cum with a man since the weekend before I’d met Megan. In the end, what was the harm? He wouldn’t dare have the nerve to bring it up, and if it did come out, I could play the drugged out innocent.
Liberated in some inexplicable and perverted way, I smiled, turned around, and with a confidence I hadn’t known since Ezekiel Ahmohoahk had begun drinking and hitting his women, went to speak with my father.
In the kitchen, my father was showing Robert how make Eskimo donuts while trying to get him to eat some pickled muktuk. We spent the entire day in that run down house as my father returned to the man I’d known as a little girl, telling his children of the way things used to be: his many seasons of subsistence whaling for bowheads and hunting tutu and oogruk while evading nanook. The stories enraptured our son, but since Robert grew up in New Jersey I had to do a bit of translating; that tutu was caribou, oogruk was walrus and nanook was the great white polar bear. It was like I was twelve again and had my family back. That afternoon the sins of the past died . . . as did my father that night.
Today, approaching forty years-old I’m back in Barrow to visit may father’s frozen grave on the tenth anniversary of his passing. This morning I sat bundled up, beside his headstone and finally told him everything I always wanted to say and I few things I’d dreaded speaking. I cursed him, I laughed, I kicked his headstone, I cried, I told him my life’s story, and at the end I introduced him to little Megan, my nine year-old daughter . . .granddaughter . . . and niece, which through her father made her granddaughter and great-granddaughter to the old man buried in the frozen ground.
The introduction reminded me of this family tree project Megan once had in school. Although she views my husband of five years as her dad, the project required info about her biological father, like hair color, eye color and career. I lied, like I always did and always would about the subject. I told her daddy was a big guy named Eric who played drums for a dark metal band in Norway and killed himself with a drug overdose when she was a year old; always served as a great ‘don’t be like daddy, just say no to drugs’ message. Well, I did actually sleep with the guy back in ‘95 after a gig in Oslo.
That night, after she went to bed, I tried to draw out the real family tree. Poor girl – in reality the damn thing looks like an M.C. Escher drawing. It’s pretty fucked up and I’m sure God is getting his giggles. But hey, I’m okay, my kids are okay, and finally . . . I can laugh right along with God.
