BILLYCORGAN.COMの「the Confessions of Billy Corgan（ビリー・コーガンの告白）」が更新されています。MySpaceにアップされているものと同じです。
our backyard (if you can call it that) is a fenced in piece of concrete, approximately 5 feet by 5 feet…there are 4 homes in each row, and about 8 rows in total…my room sits in the upper corner, so I have a clear view of the front porches and docks…on the other end of our row is a large lawn that runs the entire length of the development, perfect for playing football and baseball…just across the street from that is a deep pond, where people often fish for catfish…the entire neighborhood is filled with these different kinds of housing projects, thrown scattershot around to the point where nothing is beautiful and all is ugly…
Even though we are just a stones throw from where we used to live, the geography of our old house cuts my brother and me off from our old friends, and as the days pass we see them hardly at all, except in school…the new neighborhood has lots of young people, and we luckily make tons of new friends…the parking lot of the supermarket is perfect for baseball games, the fence of the huge car dealership next door providing proper home run distance…the supermarket itself sits at the end of a long row of businesses, starting with a very large bowling alley, and continuing on through a liquor store, a drugstore, a Chinese restaurant, and some other junk…the road just in front of the market is a large route that runs due east all the way to the lake in downtown Chicago, just over an hours drive…across from that is another set of large stores as well…so when we are bored, we just go to the stores and walk around in the air-conditioning, looking at stuff we know we cannot buy…
My step-mother not so secretly smokes, but she has promised my father who she is deathly afraid of that she has quit…when he is not around, or sleeping, she sends me covertly to buy her cigarettes…she gives me a hand-written note that says “to whom it may concern, please sell my son a pack of whatever brand cigarettes…thank you”, and then she signs her name to make it all official…she has sworn me to secrecy, and tells me in no uncertain terms that my father is not to find out she is smoking…the implication is as always that if she gets into trouble, there is much greater trouble waiting for me…when I go to the liquor store, I most often times run into the owner, who works in the back…he is not very nice, and as he makes the sale, I stare at a faded black and white picture of him as a baby, naked on a bearskin rug…I wonder how this mean old man came from this smiling, happy baby…
I call her mom now, even though I do not think of her as my mother…she functions as a mother would, providing meals and making sure we do whatever it is we are supposed to be doing, but it is so without cheer or grace that it creates an uncomfortable feeling with all it touches…my real mother hovers in the distance, over where the bright lights of the city bounce off the clouds at night…but she cannot help me now, not in this place of bombed out souls…
The anxiety of the past year since moving in with my father and my step-mother starts to add up, causing a nervousness in me that will not quit…I feel often that I cannot breathe, so suffocated am I by the oppressive nature of the household…my father seems to do drugs more regularly now, and seems to be too slow to catch on that I know he is up to doing things he shouldn’t be doing…he still thinks I am too young to notice such behaviour…at night, the nightmares start to come, the worst kinds of demons chasing me thru black forests…I begin having a series of dreams where I am lost in a concrete only world of no other people (I still have this dream occasionally, but for 20 years almost weekly)…I wake up many times during the night, fresh from falling, waking up just before I hit the ground…
I am often given bathroom duty, being expected to clean the toilet and the shower to a military level of cleanliness…I must get my step-mother to come in when I am done cleaning so that she may inspect the work herself, standing there awkwardly as she looks closely at the areas around the toilet, sink, and bath…if I have missed anything, she tells me I must clean for another long period of time (like another half-hour), and not to bother calling her until I am positive the area is perfect…because the bathroom itself has already been cleaned once, I spend a few minutes re-cleaning the area, and then just sit and wait the appropriate time in silence before calling her back…the first time that she comes into my room screaming in the middle of the night (my father isn’t home normally until 5am) involves something that has displeased her about the bathroom’s lack of cleanliness, and she drags me out of bed by my hair all the way to the bathroom down the hall…she shoves my face into the base of the toilet, so close that I can smell the odd mixture of cleaning solvents and urine, asking me if I feel that this area is clean…not knowing how to answer, she insists that the toilet is filthy, and makes me clean it all again in the middle of the night…her frequent night attacks, which involve being woken up suddenly with her standing over me screaming at the top of her lungs also include beatings and the occasional shove down the stairs…being thrown down the stairs usually involves something to do with cleaning up the kitchen…the terror of all of this gives me a terminal case of insomnia, and makes me a very light sleeper (I still suffer with insomnia at times, but it has gotten a bit better—it was very terrible for almost 25 years or so)…when my father comes home, I lay in bed awake listening to her prepare him food…I dread these sounds, the sounds of pots and pans and cooking, because it means I will have to do the cleaning up later…
I start wetting the bed almost every night…the first few times, my step-mother takes the wet sheets off wordlessly…after the first few incidents, she starts to get very angry…if my father is aware there is a problem, he doesn’t show it…my bed wetting seems to send her into overdrive, and she compounds the problem by telling me that something is wrong with me, that if I was normal like all the other boys and girls I wouldn’t be having this problem…I am terrified of her, so I start trying to hide the evidence as it were if I have wet the bed…I get away with this a few times, but she takes to checking the bed every morning, often before I get up…if she finds that I have wet the bed, she makes me stay in it for hours, as punishment for what I have done…I just lay underneath the wet covers and ask God to please kill her for me because I hate her so much…this is the time that the real violence of my life begins, becoming intertwined with all that I do and all that I am…
Copyright 2005 Billy Corgan. All Rights Reserved. Do not do reproduce or publish in hard or electronic form without written authorization.
