This document summarizes the author's difficult childhood growing up in Mashpee, Cape Cod. It describes the area as having high rates of sex offenders, welfare families, drugs, violence, and crime. The author recalls specific traumatic memories, such as having their jaw broken by their step-father at age 8, and discovering their step-father's dead body after he hanged himself when the author was 10 years old. The author presents their upbringing and experience of Cape Cod as being much harder than the popular tourist image of the area might suggest.

1. I feel like I have not been able to really write about it, not because the subject matter is so difficult, but
because I guess there is no real hero in this story. It's not a story about a hero.
It's MY story. It is the story of an interloper, an outsider, the mangy egg-sucking dog loose in the House
of Peers. A story of chances taken and squandered opportunity.
I am a destroyer. Everything I touch turns to shit, and all of my friends and associates are either lying or
lied to. It's the shit-circle of life on Cape Cod, filled with drugs and recriminations and the ever present
threat of being swallowed, by bigger, blinder fish from the even murkier depths. It is my story even
though I think the history is probably overshadowed by it's geography. So while it is my story, it is also
the story of a place I guess.
Cape Cod is often thought of as a vacation paradise, a tourist hotspot, famed for its presidential
connections and the summer homes of the rich and the famous. Almost a cariacture of itself, it is hard
to think of the Cape without the thought of the popular image of the Cape native as being a preppy
snobbish WASP sipping drinks on the veranda of their old-money homes in Wellfleet and Osterville,
khaki cargo shorts, popped collars and canvas belts with whales on them.
That is not the Cape that I come from though. The Cape I come from is more Portuguese, more
hardscrabble, more heroin than vodka, more meth than cocaine. More Carhartt than Puritan Outfitters.
We are the folks that live there year-round, whether we want to or not. We are the ones that are
somehow frightened by the thought of crossing those steep bridges that represent escape to the actual
“real world” and what it means about our own reality on our side of the canal. The workers, the labor
force that maintains and supplies the lifestyles of the washashores and the visitors. The ones who clean
up all the messes, the blood, vomit, jizz, shit and garbage left behind when everyone else either leaves
or switches places. We live just inside the highwater mark, where the wave of human trash that dumps
itself on our sands leaves its mark.
The first part of the Cape I can really say I remember with all my senses was Mashpee. Mashpee has
the unfortunate reputation as being the slums of Cape Cod, and even worse, I grew-up in a section-8
housing complex called the Mashpee United Church Village [shortened to “the village” by its
residents], so I lived in the ghetto of the slums of Cape Cod.
The village was full of sex-offenders and welfare families, almost seemingly in equal distribution and
living in a somewhat symbiotic perverted environment, where the child molestors got to either suck or
be sucked, and we got our drugs/booze/money in exchange for being sucked or sucking. We didn't even
think it was all that odd, as we didn't know any different. We just assumed [for the most part, correctly]
that something like this happened at every level of existence. As long as it was for something, was the
excuse we told ourselves, it was not for nothing.
Violence was a natural byproduct of simply being alive back then, in that place. I remember having my
jaw broken and wired shut when I was about 8, by my first step-father, for the crime of sitting in the
wrong place at the wrong time. To me, it wasn't child abuse so much as a very strong lesson in being
constantly aware of my surroundings, and not making that same mistake twice.
I saw my first dead body when I was about ten years old. Which, to me, also seemed like a normal,
natural thing. It was that same step-fathers body, he had hung himself in a stairwell and I had run up the
stairs in the dark on hands and feet, not noticing him as I ran under him, my hands skidding through the

2. muck that death so often leaves in it's wake. I remember staring in shock at my hands, wondering what
the goop was, being assailed by the smell, while his friend was at the bottom of the stairs telling me not
to turn around. Of course I turned around, and saw him rudely sticking his tongue out at me, winking,
leering, while I heard the soft sound of the dripping as it made its way down his leg.