Recently I was talking with my friend Lily about the unbelievably odd times of childhood and the past. We spoke about the alchemy of suffering, and how strange, funny, terrible, and charming life can be. It made me feel really grateful for the special people I’ve met over the years who understand this kind of thing. You know, those refreshing types who lack a certain stifling pretense because their experiences have made them a weird combination of humble, wise, rugged, funny, expansive, and unpretentiously spiritual. I feel at home with people like this, and I bet you know who you are if we’ve ever laughed about the horrors together. Beauty, beauty!

Check out Lily’s work, I love how she paints intense emotions and narratives into skin.

Anyway, this conversation made me think more deeply about my own origins, especially because I’m in the middle of moving to outer Philly after living in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, or Massachusetts for most of my life. I’ve been thinking about how much my upbringing shaped me. How it has been a great source of both pain and power, alienation and connection. Below is some writing from those truly weird years, a hazy narrative from a younger self.

Content Warning: This piece discusses gender based violence.

Brick Yard Road

It was 2005 when my parents began getting divorced. I was in fifth grade, I think. Without getting too far into the weeds, there was a church involved, a man my three younger siblings and I blamed for ruining our life, and one too many years of disintegrating good faith relations between my mom and my dad.

The other man was a lawyer we nicknamed “The Frog Man” who had a reputation for sneaky links in town, and a whole family of his own.

Of course at this point I don’t think anyone is truly “to blame” for what occurred, but it was helpful at the time to have a mythological figure, the frog man, to whom I could send my fear and anger.

My mom is a petite woman with first sharp, then sad dark blue eyes and red cheeks that flush with her moods. She met my dad when he continuously stopped into the corner store she worked at near her parents house in Thompson CT. Eventually she could tell he was coming in for her, and not actually for the items he was buying. From there it was a regular small town story, married with kids before either of them could blink.

Even though my parents had been fighting often for years leading up to the divorce, my siblings and I were kind of heartbroken when it actually happened.

My mom stayed in the three-bedroom house on Brick Yard Road in “the Quiet Corner” of Connecticut. A house my Dad and her bought at the beginning of the end of their marriage. Abutting the acre of land this house sat on was a sprawling 400 acre compound owned by a man with a fat trust fund inherited through a Chicago steel-tycoon lineage. For some godforsaken reason he bought up most of the land on the remote road and started construction on a massive medieval castle, complete with a literal moat, in 2003. Construction finished in 2010. In 2022 the property was listed on Zillow for sixty million dollars to no avail.

The part of the compound directly adjacent to our house was apparently where Mr. Trust Fund kept his collection of zoo animals. Beyond a tall wood-and-wire fence a few feet from our front door dwelled a pair of zebras. The two had dirty dull coats and looked depressed and neglected. As you might imagine a zebra to be in New England. My mom and siblings often fed them apples and carrots through the fence, which they ate apathetically.

The divorce catalyzed the formation of a strange reality around my family. An egregore created from the high emotions of close people spitting apart. My Dad went on to live with his parents temporarily. In 2006 he would buy a house of his own on Red Head Hill Road, a secluded street that ran off of Brick Yard Road less than a mile away from my moms house and the castle. Four young kids and two young parents on two connected streets in the Quiet Corner of Connecticut. Strangeness and darkness was stirring.

*Me and Mr. Pigsley in the Brick Yard house*

One cold Monday night back in December of 2005 at my moms house, soon after my dad had vacated the premises, we looked out the window to see police lights and helicopters overhead. My mom turned on the news and learned that a local woman had gone missing. Judy Nilan, a forty-four-year-old social worker at the middle school in town who lived a few streets away, had not returned from her afternoon run. Her husband had reported her missing after driving up and down her usual route and finding no trace of her.

At the time I felt pure dread settle into my stomach. I knew it was serious when my dad stopped by my mom’s house after work that day, something he hadn’t done since moving out. Instead of fighting, my parents were uncharacteristically quiet that night. I caught them exchanging strained looks as we all sat around the television and took turns nervously walking to the windows and peering out into the night.

The search continued for hours with no sign of Judy. Around 10 p.m. a state trooper came upon ominous clues on Red Head Hill Road, directly in front of my dad’s future house. They found a woman’s headband, flecks of blood on a nearby snowbank, dark tire skid marks on the road, and a blood stained receipt. The receipt was from a farm supply store detailing the purchase of a chainsaw and other items from two days earlier, signed by a thirty-seven-year-old man named Scott Deojay. The account billed for the items, however, was under the name Caroll Spinney. Spinney was an actor best known for playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street. He owned a large estate nearby on the Connecticut-Massachusetts border. The entrance was three miles down the road from my moms house, right on my school bus route.

*Google maps image around where the items were found.*

Police quickly learned that Scott Deojay was a convicted felon who worked as a groundskeeper on Spinney’s estate. Spinney’s family was away on an extended trip to Europe, but he gave investigators permission to search the property. On the morning of December 13, Judy Nilan’s body was found hidden in a pagoda on the far corner of the estate. Her hands were bound and she had been badly beaten. The official cause of death was blunt force trauma, and the autopsy noted signs of sexual assault before her death.

Most people believe Deojay stalked Judy Nilan before the murder. On the night of December 12, he is believed to have struck her with his car on the remote farm road, kidnapped her, and brought her back to Spinney’s estate, where he sexually assaulted and beat her to death. In 2006 Deojay pleaded guilty to felony kidnapping and murder and was sentenced to life without parole.

I didn’t personally know Judy Nilan because I hadn’t yet attended the middle school where she worked, but I remember many older kids in the area being deeply affected by her loss. An annual 5K race called “Jog with Judy” was organized in her honor, and I ran in it for several years.

It felt extremely disturbing to live in such close proximity to a violent murder that seemed so tragically random. I remember being mystified by the details, thinking about how someone could be alive, moving through ordinary routines, and then suddenly gone forever. How can the space between life and death be breached in just moments? What are the mechanisms by which someone decides to take another person’s life? The world felt so sharp and deep, but also absurd in a cruel way.

There was something else I caught a glimpse of, too, as I started to become a teenager in this vortex: a dark shadow of violence connected to women that went unspoken, yet loomed heavily at the edges of my awareness. The concept of “woman” began to feel like a trap, a camouflage-covered pit on the forest floor that I might be able to sidestep if I were clever enough.

The world, as it began to form before me, felt dark, dangerous, and rich with mystery. Like being a wounded bug dying in a giant compost heap. Sublime, horrifying, and demanding surrender. The black phase of alchemy.

In an attempt to make things nicer during a hard time, my mom let my siblings and me paint the two bedrooms we slept in any colors we wanted. We chose a sickening creamsicle orange for the left room and a harsh lime green for the right. My sister and I slept in the orange room on two twin mattresses unceremoniously strewn across the floor. There was no other furniture except a wooden shelf where I kept my large collection of cows: stuffed cows, ceramic cows, a squishy keychain cow that “pooped” when you squeezed it, cow stickers, a cow painted on a rock. Anything featuring a cow in any form was welcome in the collection.

*I wish I had a real picture of my extensive cow collection.*

I watched episodes of Law & Order: SVU on a portable DVD player to fall asleep. One night, after sifting through a garbage bag of hand-me-downs from my cousin, I put on a blue two-piece bathing suit from L.L. Bean. Standing in the orange room beneath the yellow overhead light, I looked in the mirror and, for the first time, thought maybe I looked kind of fat, and I should try not eating tomorrow.

At the time I was being bullied badly at school by my “friends”, a group of girls from the wealthier side of town. They would steal my phone and send sexually explicit messages to random boys in my grade pretending to be me. They were cruel to me in a way I did not know was possible, and I defended myself poorly. I was so dissociated at the time it barely pierced the bubble of fog around me until later in life.

My mom and siblings weren’t faring much better. The Frog Man had stopped coming around, partly because of the icy reception from my siblings and I. My mom was depressed, and struggling financially in the wake of the divorce. One day she bought a cheap french-fry maker from Walmart and immediately set a third of the kitchen on fire trying it out. She was racking up credit-card debt and working all the time.

Our house was broken into twice within four weeks, though there was really nothing worth stealing. The first time they entered through a broken basement window and took our VCR. The second time they must have realized the doors were always unlocked, so they simply walked in and tossed my mom’s bedroom upside down, probably hoping to find cash.

There were sweet moments, too. Every morning before school, my mom would wake me up, and I’d stagger downstairs without speaking and plop myself inches from the TV. I’d watch MTV music videos for twenty minutes while I slowly woke up, and my mom would always hand me a cup of black tea with cream and sugar.

Every Thursday night, for some reason, we all watched Rock of Love, the dating show with Bret Michaels. My siblings and I would get hyper on Coca Cola and freak out and yell about our favorite girls. My mom would even get into it too.

My family really knew how to laugh, especially during the ridiculous hard times. That was something my mom has always been good at.

Being in a haunted pressure-cooker situation with my family had a way of propelling each of us both away from and toward each other at breakneck speed. I can see now that there has always been a baseline of love there, even when we couldn’t break the surface to express it.

One summer I developed a love interest down the street on Brick Yard Road, a classmate I met on the bus, a redneck boy named Marcus. His house sat tucked behind a graveyard of rusted cars and junk. On an August afternoon I walked the three-quarters of a mile there, arriving sweaty and frizzy-haired. Marcus served me a chunk of venison steak heated in the microwave on a paper plate. His dad came in and said Marcus wasn’t allowed to hang out with his little friend until he finished stacking wood.

I sat alone in the kitchen chewing the venison slowly, staring at their old beagle sighing next to me on the floor for what felt like an eternity.

I can’t even remember if Marcus ever came back.

It seemed like I should wander down to the next house on the street and see what their interior life looked like, what they might offer me if I came inside…

To be continued

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Brick Yard Road

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