Bullseye

8/01/19
Prompt or not: bullseye
~*~

Winning.
Trump consistently brags about winning.
He rarely mentions service.

In the summer of 2016, when I read Tony Schwartz's exposé, Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All, in The New Yorker, I found myself drawing comparisons to how things turned out with my ex-mental health therapist and I.

I've been through some bizarre things in my life. Most people might think the trip with jimson weed would be the most bizarre.

And it was bizarre -- hellish hallucinations of witch doctors dancing circles around me; of being raped on a mattress with exposed springs that was on a platform in the middle of the local college football field; of living in a circular sanitorium for the insane located in an aquarium in a secret, altered world; of breaking my arm while riding a horse from a castle in medieval times; of being eaten by roaches; of dying and ascending to heaven where Crosby, Steels, Nash, and Young sang for me. My boyfriend and I each ate three pods of jimson seeds on a Tuesday afternoon. They took their effect within a half-hour or so. That evening we both ended up in two separate hospitals. I stayed wide awake hallucinating (having no idea my body was being held by a restraint around my abdomen to a hospital bed with each arm, one connected to an IV, belted to the bedrails in an Intensive Care Unit) until sometime Friday evening after I was injected with a solution to antidote the datura stramonium, the Hindi-Greek botanical name for Jimson weed. It felt like roller coaster coming back into the realm of realty. I was 15 years old.

Yet, even compared to that, my experience with John Knapp was bizarre.

In one of Knapp's thirteen 2011 online smear pieces, he made a statement, "Game on." But he was the only one playing a game. He lied. He threatened. He made himself out as a victim. He name-called. He assigned evil motives. He rallied his supporters, until he then turned on most of them.

Almost a year earlier Knapp's last words to me in an email, where he accused me (among other things) of "destroying our friendship" and for disloyalty, were, "Have a nice life." I was 51 years old.

Almost a year later Knapp threw those same last words publicly at one of his defenders whom he had turned on. Someone who, like me, had been one of his clients. Someone who, like me, Knapp chastised for their disloyalty.

As I read Schwartz's exposé, it was uncanny -- the similarities with Knapp. But the most uncanny words came at the end when Tony Schwartz writes Trump's last words to him, after Trump chastises Tony for not being loyal and for not remaining silent. Trump said, "Have a nice life."

For a moment, I stopped breathing.