It was 4 AM. I could hear the rowdy partying of my parents in the living room. I heard Roy Orbison playing through the old Marantz speakers in the dining room. I heard the loud, inebriated laughing that comes from hours of drinking. I smelled cigarette smoke wafting into my room. I couldn’t sleep. How long was this going to last? I got out my favorite book “A Wrinkle in Time” and tried to start reading to drown out the noise. I shut my door. I put cotton in my ears. This was crazy.
My parents would drink every night and start fighting about work. I would sit behind the wall to the hallway and peer around the corner. Crying, I would try to soothe my younger sister and tell her that everything was going to be okay. It wasn’t..
My parents always had high expectations of me; as they thought I was going to be perfect. I was blonde, first-born, and very smart. They thought I was destined for stardom probably as much as I did. I felt I had to live up to this role. So I became very obsessive-compulsive and did things very neat and orderly so this must have projected an air of perfection, although inside I was a mess. I was a conglomeration of angst, delusion, and paranoia. I wanted to free myself from all of this outer-imposed perfection. Sometimes I would act like a cat and climb around the furniture. My parents just thought it was a weird little quirk of mine, an eccentricity.
My parents did things other parent’s didn’t. They allowed me to do things other parents wouldn’t do. My parents would throw M500 dynamite sticks onto their neighbor’s lawn and cackle when they all ran out of their house screaming.
“Hey, Rod, go now!”
“Oh shit, Les, they are going to freak out!”
We waited behind the bushes until we saw the whole family run out of their front doors screaming and onto their lawn by their fish pond. I started laughing myself. My parents peeled away in our 1987 Chevrolet station wagon.
They would light tires on fire on the beach and roast our marshmallows in it. They would throw dry ice bombs into empty fields and watch them blow to bits.
“Les, remember to bring home some dry ice from the store,” my dad reminded my mom. My mom owned a Baskin-Robbins store and she got dry ice to bring home to make bombs. They inserted a small amount of dry ice into empty soda bottles which we got from the store too, and then they would throw them way out into open fields and cackle when they exploded. They were really loud and actually terrifying to me in a way.
They bought me a little motorcycle when I was 9 and I got to ride it around my neighborhood, no helmet included. Through all this, I prayed that I was adopted.
I myself was a frightened child. I had demons. I was a paranoid child with not only delusional thoughts but actual delusions of grandeur in the psychotic sense. I was scared of everything: the dark, shadows, strangers, shapes in the night, anything and everything. I thought I was special, I thought I was adopted from my all too common parents from royalty, and fame was at my fingertips. I thought that someone was after me all the time. I had nightmares every night that I was being abducted, kidnapped, I even had dreams that aliens took over my body. So I had to find a way to make other people feel like me, because I knew they didn’t. I knew everyone else was living a rather tranquil life, while my head and my house were out of control.
I didn’t need company, as a mere friend would provide. I needed an escape route. An escape to somewhere far, far away. It wasn’t a matter of getting out of my room, my house, my town, my country. It was a matter of getting off this planet.

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So over the years of my childhood, starting at about seven years old, I began to create an alter ego; Hezra.
One night while I was in my bedroom alone, and my sister had gone to sleep, I was looking around in the dark. I could see my Asian shrine (because I always believed I had some Asian blood in me and that it was a secret that I was adopted from Asia.) I looked at all the overstuffed pillows and the billowy curtains that moved with the wind outside and I got scared. I imagined some man sitting under my window and lurking up and watching me while I sleep. I was so scared, even by my sister, that I took down the curtains and pulled down the shades and shut them all the way. I moved dolls in my room that I thought were looking at me. I lay awake listening to my parents fight and tried to close my eyes and make everything just go away. I let my mind wander. Suddenly I heard a voice, a young girl’s voice. Echoey and distant.
“Hello, I hear you need a friend.”
I said, “how did you hear this?”
She said, “I don’t know, I just hear things.”
I thought to myself I must be going crazy and all of this sleep deprivation must be really getting to me. But for some reason, I chose to keep on talking.
“Yes, sometimes I wish I was someone else.”
“So do I.”
“Really, what do you wish for?”
“I wish I could go to your planet”, she said “it’s so cold and lonely out here.”
“I wish I could be alone, and hear myself think, I said.
“Well, maybe I could do something about that”, she replied.
All of a sudden I began to feel very tingly and my body became numb. I felt that someone was in the room with me, but I wasn’t sure. All of the sudden I opened my eyes and I had a feeling of newness. I had a feeling that I had never seen this room before. I made believe part of this…. I made believe that I was now Hezra. That I was long gone into outerspace. Soemwhere far, far away. I will call it the ninth dimension. The ninth dimension is a place where people intuitively understand each other based on perceptions and unspoken things. The ninth dimension has no space, time, physical or realistic measures as to how things are perceived. Everything is fluid and one. This was what I wanted, and Hezra had. Maybe she would find it different here. And I sure did.
“How are you?” I heard.
“I feel better now, “ I said.
“So do I.” That was the last time Hezra spoke to me. From then on, I made her up, I brought her at my will whenever I felt like it. I imagined her as as lovely and blonde and foreignly beautiful. I was her friend, and she was mine. Although we never communicated because we both spoke different languages, we had an implicit understanding that we wanted to go where each other was. We wanted to change places.


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When I became Hezra in front of my friends they became scared, just like me. Hezra was the perfect escape and excuse to get out of my delusional world. I would come up with a language that was a hybrid of Japanese and Chinese I believe. It was very skittish and angular, very inconvenient and cumbersome. I loved the language of the unknown; I loved the area of the unknown. I loved the fact that nobody knew me and vice-versa. I was a loner. I was invisible. I was no one. I flew high in outer space. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing as myself in Hezra’s place. I didn’t really know or care what she was doing, other than she was gone doing other things. There was such empathy.
Sometimes I would become Hezra when I was all alone in my room and experience an out-of-body transcendental sort of surrealness. Sometimes I would do Hezra in front of my sister and scare the shit out of her. Sometimes I would just feel different, walking down the halls at school, or riding in the car with mom. I knew Hezra had some sort of role in these feelings.
The best times was when I had an audience. A slumber party or some sort of overnight gathering where there were lots of frightened girls. I would usually pull the skit after the ghost stories were told. “Kanwaki no tishima, aaaaaggghhhh!” I would open my eyes in front of my friends and act absolutely shocked and frightened at them and my surroundings. My favorite word was “Hashimat!” I think it was a mix of what I heard about Hiroshima (which I knew had a bad and fearful connotation) and “shit” (which I just knew was BAD.) It just sounded kind of like a stunning word to me. My friends had no idea what was happening. They would all frantically look at each other and wonder what the hell was going on. I knew exactly what I was doing, I was scaring the wits out of them.
I would get up and roam around the room and touch everything, including them, and look at my fingers to see what would happen. I acted like I had never seen other people before. Now I don’t know if Hezra was surrounded by other people, but this is how I acted. It made the act all the more fearful. I didn’t want them to run for their parents, so I stood against the door and locked them all in. One time I remember two girls started crying and yelling to their mom so loud that she actually heard from downstairs. She came running up the stairs and rapped loudly on the door.
“Open the door….who is holding the door?” the mother yelled. I had a psychotic grip on the door.
“Mom, help us! Help us! Kim is going crazy!” the girls yelled.
“Kim, you open up that door right now!” the mother said.
I gave in, and released my grip on the door handle.
“Mom, she started scaring all of us, acting like this girl from somewhere else…..”
The girls explained and explained away, but by the end of the conversation Kim had become Kim and there was nothing to say. I was the child that all the parents wanted their kids to be like. Exemplary student, proactive in out-of-school activities, good at sports, and “had a good head on her shoulders.” The mother didn’t know what to say so she just told us to “keep it down and go to sleep.” When the mother left, the kids all got in their beds and were silent. They wanted to sleep away off into a land where I didn’t exist.

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The best part was when I wanted to be deviant; it could be Hezra that did it. One time my friend came over, Kelly, and I felt like the devil incarnate. I wanted to make the toilet bowl blue (like the commercials), I wanted to terrorize our babysitter, I felt compelled to burn down the house. I wanted to destroy my life. To destroy my parent’s lives, and I wanted to burn down those memories, hatred, hurt, pain, everything about my family. I wanted to burn down everything that this family and this house stood for. My house was a rather large sized house built in the early 80’s. We had a sauna, three porches, and a back and front yard. We had a downstairs and an upstairs, and I was always afraid to go downstairs because there were windows everywhere that didn’t quite lock, and they were always opening accidentally. I only went down there to play in the sauna. My house had just gotten brand new white carpeting in my parent’s room, and the whole kitchen and living room had been done over with white tile and formica. The house was impeccably decorated by my mom down to every last soap sitting on a Chinese sculpture. She really went all out when it came to decorating. Even though the house was beautiful and had its good points, I still wanted to move to get rid of the memories. I wanted to be where Hezra was still. I thought about it all the time.
When Kelly came over, I took the babysitter outside and said we were going to play a game. In this game, she stood against a wooden beam on my porch, and I tied a rope around her as she tried to get out.
“What exactly are we doing Kim?”
“Oh, just a game, I promise you it will be fun,” I said with a grin.
“Well, don’t leave me tied up too long!”
“Why would I do a thing like that?” I said.
I told her I would untie her, if she couldn’t do it herself. I didn’t. The lime green jumprope was tight around her. She played along. I tied it behind her and started laughing and ran inside locking the sliding glass door behind me.

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I got a chair from our dining room table and stood on it to reach the cabinet that was not for kids. Not for my sister and I. This is where all the good things were, like matches, medications, pest killers, poison things mainly. I grabbed a huge box of matches and ran with Kelly down to the sauna. I struck match after match against the wooden sauna wall, but nothing happened. I didn’t know what to do, so gave up. A strange sense came into me, because I realized I hadn’t finished my plan of terror.
I went to go get the dye to color the toilet blue. This was sort of a weird fascination that came into my head. I was still Hezra. I was still out of my body. I could feel this rush coursing through my veins of evil blood.
There was only red dye. I opted for a red toilet bowl, I didn’t know about menstruation or periods yet, so it didn’t make sense to me that this might look gross. I thought it would look evil, demonic, something like the things I saw at night in my head. I walked across the new white carpet that my parents had gotten unknowingly leaking the red dye onto the carpet. This was food coloring, but it never came out, no matter how much hot water my mom immediately put on the carpet soon after her arrival home, it never came out. Ooohhhh…… I was BAD.
The babysitter was tied up, the toilet bowl blood red, but the house was still not in flames yet. I was still Hezra. I loved this. I hoped that my parents would blame Hezra and not me. But of course it would be me. At the time, I had no thoughts of repercussions, no thoughts of results of what I had done or what I might do. There was no rational bone in my body then.. I was evil Hezra, a disassociated one. Hezra wasn’t necessarily evil, she just did whatever she wanted without limitations. She was my best and only friend. She was the only one that understood me.