Good Clean White Sex & Other Family Traditions

My father called my mother "good white pussy." He tried to burn our house down with my pregnant mother inside.

This was Tuesday afternoon in my family.

When violence is your inheritance and chaos is your curriculum, you learn that normal is a lie people tell themselves. You learn to read a room in seconds. You learn which kind of silence means someone's about to die.

This episode is about the family traditions no one puts in scrapbooks.

The ones that teach you survival before you learn to tie your shoes.

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Content warnings: This podcast contains discussions of childhood sexual abuse, addiction, violence, death, and trauma. It is also full of profound love, transformation, and hope. Listener discretion advised.

Transcript

The Archaeologist of My Souls: 1 in 8.3 Billion

Episode Two: Good White Pussy, Attempted Murder, and Other Family Traditions

Content warnings: This podcast contains discussions of childhood sexual abuse, addiction, violence, death, and trauma. But it also full of profound love, transformation, and hope. Listener discretion advised.

My father was half German, half Black, and completely broken by this country. That's too many halves, but that's how it felt living with him—like he was always at war with himself, always losing. He'd spent part of his childhood eating out of garbage cans in Camden, New Jersey, just trying to stay alive. Scarred doesn't even begin to cover what racism and poverty had done to him. He was carved up by hate, gutted by deprivation, and stitched back together with pure, undiluted rage.

He met my mother at an Ike & Tina Turner concert in Hollywood in 1963. Fire met gasoline, and they both thought the explosion was passion.

She was still serving champagne to celebrities at Scandia, still perfecting her ice queen routine, still thinking Hollywood might have a place for her that didn't involve taking her clothes off. He was a mixed-race man navigating a country that had spent his entire life telling him he didn't belong anywhere—too Black for white spaces, too light for some Black ones, too poor for anywhere that mattered.

The concert was at the Hollywood Palladium, that art deco palace where dreams went to get their teeth kicked in. Ike and Tina were at their peak—raw, electric, dangerous. The kind of music that made you want to do things that would horrify your mother and thrill your therapist.

My mother was there with some other Scandia girls, dressed like she was going to church instead of a concert that was basically foreplay set to music. My father spotted her from across the crowd—this blonde Nordic goddess in a sea of Hollywood wannabes—and something in him decided he had to have her.

She fell in love instantly with his danger, his fury, his complete rejection of every rule white society had tried to teach her about who she was supposed to want. Here was a
man who didn't apologize for taking up space, who moved through the world like he owned it even when the world kept telling him he didn't.

Years later, romantic teenage me asked him what first attracted him to her. He didn't hesitate, didn't soften it, didn't pretend it was her eyes or her laugh or her gentle soul.

"Good white pussy," he said, like he was ordering coffee.


That was his poetry. That was his "Once upon a time." That crude, brutal reduction of my mother to a racial conquest and a body part pretty much sums up everything you need to know about how love worked in our house.

Maybe it was rebellion—his way of flipping off a system that had spent his entire life telling him he couldn't have what white men took for granted. Maybe it was his own internal compass, pointing toward whatever would cause the most damage to everyone involved. Or maybe he was just a broken man who confused possession with love and revenge with healing.

Whatever it was, my father only dated white women. It was his pattern, his compulsion, his middle finger to a world that had tried to make him feel less than human. And my mother? She signed up for that particular brand of chaos with both eyes wide open—or maybe both eyes squeezed shut. Hard to tell which would be worse.

They got married in 1964, at a time when their love was literally illegal in most of the country. Interracial marriage was still banned in sixteen states. Think about that for a moment: the piece of paper they signed in Los Angeles could have gotten them both thrown in prison if they'd driven it to Alabama or Mississippi. Their love wasn't just scandalous or unconventional—it was evidence. Contraband. A crime against the natural order, according to laws written by men who thought they had the right to regulate human hearts.
They moved to Watts because it was the only ZIP code in Los Angeles where a Black man and a white woman could walk down the street together without cops immediately assuming she was a prostitute and he was her pimp. Watts wasn't just a neighborhood—it was a powder keg that had been sitting in the California sun for decades, and everyone could smell the smoke.

My mother traded her Scandia uniform for maternity clothes and the promise of a life that looked nothing like serving champagne to Henry Kissinger. She went from ice queen to housewife, from independence to isolation, from having her own money to begging for grocery cash.

By August 1965, that fuse finally burned down to nothing. What started as a routine traffic stop became six days of tanks rolling through residential streets, helicopters circling overhead like mechanical vultures, and whole city blocks reduced to smoldering skeletons of what used to be businesses and dreams.

The Watts uprising wasn't random. It was decades of systematic oppression finally finding its voice in shattered glass and burning buildings. The LAPD had been hunting Black people in that neighborhood for years, and suddenly, violently, the neighborhood pushed back.

My mother had steel in her spine—she'd proven that by leaving Sweden and marrying my father in the first place. She took the glares from white strangers who saw her as a race traitor, the whispers from Black women who saw her as competition, the constant low-level hostility from people who couldn't understand what she was doing with "one of them."

But the uprising was different. White skin in Watts during those six days wasn't just unwelcome—it was dangerous. She couldn't go to the store without people looking at her like she was either an undercover cop or a walking target. Most days, she stayed inside with the curtains drawn, listening to the windows rattle from explosions blocks away.
The violence found her anyway. At a bar where she'd made the mistake of being seen talking to a Black man who wasn't my father, a woman followed her to the bathroom, smashed a vodka bottle, and opened up my mother's scalp like she was cracking an egg. My mother spent months in the hospital, her head wrapped in bandages, learning to walk again without falling over.

I was placed somewhere for four months during her recovery—some relative, some arrangement I've blocked out. Hard to blossom as a child when you're getting sexually molested by the people who are supposed to keep you safe while your mother recovers from having her skull cracked open.

Meanwhile, my father had started making regular pilgrimages to the Playboy Club on Sunset Strip. Bunny ears, cigarette smoke, jazz music, and infidelity served up with overpriced drinks and the kind of atmosphere that made married men feel sophisticated about cheating on their wives.

One evening, my mother confronted him about his extracurricular activities. She was pregnant with my brother Eric at the time—swollen belly, swollen ankles, hormones making her brave enough to ask questions she usually kept to herself.

Things escalated fast, the way they always did when you mixed my father's guilt with his rage and added whatever he'd been drinking. My mother locked herself in the bedroom to avoid another beating, and my father—ever the creative problem solver— poured lighter fluid on the shag carpet outside the door and set it on fire.

Who needs couples therapy when your husband's love language is arson?


The fire department showed up before the whole house became a crematorium. Lucky break for all of us. But that wasn't rock bottom. Not even close.

One night, my father came home riding a cocktail of hashish and cheap whiskey—a combination that brought out the absolute worst in a man who was already pretty terrible on his best days. The next morning, my mother opened her closet to find every
single dress she owned slashed to ribbons with a razor blade. Sleeves hanging like dead skin. Fabric shredded so thoroughly it looked like confetti. Her entire wardrobe destroyed in a fit of rage she'd slept through.

When she confronted him, he responded by grabbing her, dragging her to the front door, and throwing her out of the house. Completely naked. Not even a towel or a sheet to cover herself. Just a grown woman, standing on her own front porch at seven in the morning, clutching herself and trying to figure out how her life had become a cautionary tale.

She ran to a neighbor's house, pounding on the door, begging for help while trying to cover herself with her hands. The neighbors called the police, and even two white cops in 1960s Los Angeles looked at my father and said, "Sir, you cannot throw your wife out of the house buck naked."

That was my mother's breaking point. Not the beatings or the cheating or even the arson. But being stripped of her dignity in broad daylight, reduced to a naked woman on a porch while the neighbors watched through their curtains.

She was done.


She called in a favor from Gloria, a Black woman who lived next door and understood exactly what kind of extraction mission this was going to require. Gloria showed up in a banana-yellow VW Bug followed by a beat-up pickup truck carrying two of the largest Black men I'd ever seen. They moved our furniture out while my father sat on the porch laughing—not the funny kind of laugh, but the chilling kind that promised this wasn't over.

Then she buckled me and Eric into the back seat, rolled down the window, and flipped him the bird as we drove away.

But here's the legal problem with dramatic exits: when you take kids without permission, you've just committed kidnapping. Didn't matter that he'd thrown her out
naked or destroyed her property or set their carpet on fire. In the eyes of the law, she was now a mother on the run, and that made her a fugitive.

We lived that way for years. Secret codes for everything. If the phone rang once and hung up, it meant the coast was clear. Two rings meant danger. We moved every three months—sometimes more often if he found our address. As a child, I thought this was normal. New place, new school, new neighbors, new trauma. "Come on, let's go!" became the soundtrack of my childhood.

We lived in a household where terror was the foundation. I became a master at adapting to new places, new faces, new lies about why we had to leave so quickly. I learned to pack a bag in under five minutes. I learned to sleep with one ear open. I learned that home wasn't a place—it was wherever my mother was standing between us and the darkness.

She got a job at Host International, the flying saucer-looking restaurant that sat on top of the original LAX terminal like something from The Jetsons. It was "space age meets minimum wage," but she was working, surviving, building something that looked almost like a normal life.

Until the day my father waited in the parking lot after her shift and beat the living hell out of her in front of a dozen witnesses. She couldn't show her face at work for two weeks—partly because of the bruises, partly because of the shame that comes with having your private horror become public spectacle.

She filed for a restraining order the next day. Being white helped with that, apparently. The system that had spent years treating my father like a suspect suddenly took my mother's word as gospel when she needed protection from him.

This was our life: fear disguised as precaution, survival dressed up as adventure. I only realized much later in life that I could cut anyone out of my existence with surgical precision. No warning. No explanation. No remorse. Just gone. People called it strength. I called it survival.
There was no safe place in our world. No "home base" in the game of our lives. No enough of anything—not enough food, not enough money, not enough safety, not enough peace. And love? I realized when I turned sixty that I had never actually felt loved as a child. Not once. Not by either parent.

But survival also forged something in me that nothing could break later in life. Something sharp and uncompromising and absolutely indestructible. That's the paradox of growing up in chaos: the same people who destroy your childhood give you the tools you need to build an adult life they can never touch.

My mother didn't crumble under the weight of my father's violence. She got up, she ran, she built something better out of the broken pieces of what used to be her life. She learned how to keep going when everything felt gone. How to find strength in places she didn't know existed. How to love people fiercely while keeping one foot pointed toward the exit, just in case.

That strength didn't save us from trauma. Nothing could have done that. But it saved our lives. And sometimes, when you're living in the middle of other people's damage, that's the best you can hope for.

If survival made you hard, you're not broken—you're built for something bigger than the people who tried to destroy you. If your love language includes control, silence, or scanning every room for exits, you're not damaged—you're prepared.

You didn't choose the fire that forged you. But you get to choose what you do with the strength it left behind.