Sometimes Tonk would roll up a newspaper, make you pull down your flower and bumblebees and whack you. Hard. “Ay cheee wha-wha!” he’d hoot. Tonk never laughed. He hooted. He’d panty-whack you, then lean over, hoot, and get all friendly-friendly again. After this he’d start to cry. “I never had no birthday party. I never had nothing but Daddy’s strap and Mama yellin’ shit. I didn’t have no nice Mama like you.” Here he’d sniff, squinch his eyes up and sniffle a little more. “And now you got yourself a nice Daddy, too. You like your Daddy Tonk, dontcha?” Closer now, so his fumes gusted hot up your nostril, like the breeze off roadkill at high noon in Reno, when you kneeled down beside it and prayed to change places.

Slowly at first, then faster and faster, Tonk’s sobs turned to a hacking cough, his cough turned to dry, chest-clutching heaves, his heaves to a kind of greegly-greegly-greegly noise that didn’t even seem to come from his throat, more out of his pores, like they weren’t pores at all, but tiny screaming mouths in dirt-crust skin. The harder you tried to turn away the harder he held you. The meth sent his temperature so high his fingers scalded your face. He smelled pan-fried from the inside, five foot three of meat-taint and screeching mini-lips. Even now, the memory brings residual Tonk stink and you have to fight to breathe, or you gag.

You don’t have to explain why you drink, why you hate men and can’t stop fucking them. But you always do.

No matter how much you yelled for your mother, she never answered. Even when she was right there in the cuddle room. At your house the bedroom was called the cuddle room, on account of Tonk thought bedroom was a stupid name. “We don’t call the living room the couch room, do we?”

How Bed turned to Cuddle was, one night, after Tonk started his usual fun— “Hey Mama, come pick the nits off’n your Daddy’s belly hair!”—he asked you to come up with a better name. (You didn’t know what nits were and you never saw any but Tonk and Mommy would pick through each other’s hair for hours, days maybe. The first time Tonk smoked crystal he got so tweaked he shaved his entire body, even his eyebrows. When he was done he looked like something with the crust peeled off. His lips, minus his usual Fu Manchu, shone pinkish brown, sphinctery.)

“Cuddle Room,” you blurted—still your proudest little-girl moment—when Tonk asked you to rename the bedroom. You didn’t have to think. You’d once run in and seen him holding Mommy down, doing something, right on top of her, his crinkly bee-hind squeezing up and down, up and down, like it was trying to pop something out. He had an eyeball tattooed on each ass-cheek and the ass-eyes stared like they knew things about you. Knew things, but weren’t going to say. When he was really mad at your Mom, he’d make her kneel behind his butt and yell at her, “Read, bitch! Read, you fucking cow-hole.” That’s when you realized the eyeballs were made from a circle of words, tattooed in. You didn’t know how, you didn’t know what they said, because you never got close enough—you never would, unless he had a steak knife on you. Even then…