Chapter Two-A View to a Kill
A chance to find the phoenix for the flame,
A chance to die…
Duran Duran
I had, of course, died before.
Well to be more precise I had been killed many times before. In my past I had created myself several times over in a vain attempt to be more of something I thought I was lacking. Taking from one place and giving to another in my mind, I hoped to somehow create a me that was not lacking in those small parts that make up a man. Like most things in my life, I hoped it was a matter of math and that sooner or later a workable equation could be found. It was all a matter of social science.
I had tried to be smart only to find myself pulled out of normal classes into advanced courses and away from my not so smart friends. I found myself surrounded by people who were even more anti social than I was but didn’t seemed hampered by it. I did what I could to produce the stupidity I thought would get me out of the classes but instead of ignorance they classified it as willfulness and then as a behavior problem. In the end I found myself in a whole different type of class, one that was filled with juvenile delinquents and drug wasteoids but in the end just another class my friends weren’t in. The funny part of that story was my mom dragged me out of the city less than a year later without even a chance to say good bye to anyone, so my great quest to find the correct kind of stupid in garnered me the same net result I would have made by staying smart, nothing. In the end the advance courses as well as the behavioral detention prepared me for a lesson far greater than those found on any test. They taught me how to pull my heart out and keep moving.
I had tried to be funny, on the chance it would be almost impossible for someone to beat someone else while laughing. I found out later this was in fact very doable. The first funny thing I tried out was a Dan Aykroyd, Saturday Night Live skit during one of my mom’s ever present parties. Party is too controlled a word for what they actually were, a collection of drunken bikers who had nothing better to do then smoke and drink themselves into a complete stupor every night. About once every four days the circuit would round back to our place and no matter what the day, school night or not, the house was filled with middle aged drug addicts all vainly trying not to look into each other’s eyes on the off chance they saw something they recognized. At first these people were cool and tolerable for many reasons. One, they were always happy. They laughed a lot and had that decibel too loud voice drunk people have. One click below screaming they were always, HEY LITTLE MAN WHAT’S UP !!, or WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP SO LATE ??, or my personal favorite, SHIT MAN ARE YOU ALREADY GOING TO SCHOOL, WHAT THE FUCK TIME IS IT ? Another reason I liked them was that my mom was forced to pretend to be a normal mom while they were around. Since these people, these low life scum bags were the center of her life, THEIR opinion were the ones that counted. It didn’t matter if every teacher I had at school wondered why I was so weird or my grandparents worried that she was neglecting me to the point of criminal prosecution. Instead these middle class junkies were the ones she craved acceptance from so while they were around, she became a mom.
Not my mom mind you, but a mom nonetheless.
She would talk about how proud she was of me and how smart I was, though she hadn’t signed one of my report cards in over 4 years. She would go on about how smart my teachers thought I was despite the fact she hadn’t woken up a minute before noon since I was 7 and missed every parent-teacher conference she was invited to. For the few moments they were there and I was visible I was her son and she was proud. I found it odd that the things she was proud of had little to do with who I actually were, but leave people stranded in the middle of the desert for weeks they will drink the sand cause there is nothing left for them to drink. It was nice to hear her say anything nice about me, even if she was incorrect about it. So I thought if I could be funny-funny kid I might just be able to score a Get out of a Beating Card.
That’s a reference from the game of Life where you get driven around in a car that has no door handles and watch your life speed by as your mother buries the speedometer in some Peter Pan, Kamikaze effort to stop the aging process. In the end you find yourself stranded on the wrong side of childhood looking at a pack of high school kids laughing at you as cranberry juice spills down over your eyes. It’s a game for the whole dysfunctional family.
So here I was, a 9 year old Steve Martin, ready for my ten minutes at the Improv. Instead of a brick wall with a tacky neon sign it was our living room fireplace with a tacky brass duck my mom had shoplifted from Gemco while stoned one day. Her circle of friends had pulled up some carpet around me, cause they were fucked up beyond belief and the thought a nine year old kid was going to tell jokes at 3 in the morning seemed perfectly rational to them. My mom smiled that gentle buzz smile that most chronic alkies have when in the middle of a four day binge, the guy she was fucking at the time sat next to her, his eyes half opened, beer suds on his Village People mustache. They all sat there, one held breath of anticipation. I cleared my throat, looked at my mom and said.
Linda you ignorant slut, who did you sleep with to get this job anyway ?
He died halfway down the hall as the sounds of her friends thunderous laughing was drowned out by the wet slapping sounds my cleats made as she slammed them against any surface of my body she could find. My legs, my arms, my face. I missed two days of school after that since the swelling and cuts looked like nothing this side of being mauled by a mountain lion would produce. Funny, funny kid wasn’t even an hour old when he was killed.
I had been killed many times before. Yet like a mythical phoenix I rose from my own ashes.
Only to have some jackass douse me liberally with gasoline and light me aflame moments after. Time and time again I had played this game with myself. Sitting there in my head, nursing third degree burns I first told myself I was never going to move again. I was going to die here in my mind. Light years away from the people who tried to hurt me I would simply go further and further within myself and one day, I would just forget how to find my way back. I would lie on my bed for hours and hours, nearly catatonic in my oblivion of the passing of time. I figured the less I moved the less I would hurt. And it turned out to be true in a lot of ways.
But after awhile my head would peek out of my charred and blackened shell and I would look around and marvel and the light and vitality of the world around me. I would see people, tons of people just…living. They had friends and jobs and lives and just stuff. They went from here to there and did what they wanted and it looked so damned easy. I would first stew at what they had and I didn’t and then I would simmer in resentment.
Then let sit in own juices for a few weeks, remove from heat, allow to cool and then add a liberal dose of peer pressure with half a class of acceptance. Mix in some sexual confusion for flavor and then smother in denial until you’re ready to put it back in the steam cooker once more.
And that my friends is how you make a new life.
You just one day, forget how much the last one hurt and make a new one. And then you practice the shocked and terrified face you’ll make when the inevitable homicide occurs. It’s important to have that look down, it’s going to be the one thing you take away from all of this later. A wall of last moments, little Polaroid’s of lives once lived. Different parts of yourself put up and burned at the social stake one at a time. One by one until the real you is left. The you that has nothing but raw and undiluted pain for blood covered in a thin layer of envy and jealousy. A flesh and blood balloon of a skin that covers your wounds so tightly and so completely that it only takes one prick, one tiny little point of pain to have it burst under you. And the life you so carefully crafted out of a paper mache concoction of hopes and delusions goes up in an explosion that can only be described as reality.
One after another after another. I had been killed many times before.
But this time, this time…come on say it with me….you know what’s next.
This time it was going to be different.
My mother’s last adventure had left her high and dry. Actually her last adventure left her with a warrant and fleeing local authorities but where my mother was concerned these little details never slowed her down. She just pulled up stakes wherever she was, grabbed me and took off right out of Dodge. It never mattered to her what I was doing or how ingrained I was into the community around me at the time. The only thing that mattered was we had to leave and leave we did. Leaving was the other thing I did well.
Standing very quietly and not drawing attention to myself was the other.
So with very little fanfare and even less warning we ended up in Livermore, the town my grandparents lived. This was a comfortable ritual for my mom. She would sweep into town, a whirlwind of half stories and future dreams. She would parade me around like a prize dog showing how clean my teeth were and that my pedigree was simply getting better and better the more schools I was exposed to and if she was asking for money it was for me and not her. Never her, no sirrie Bob. She was the saint adrift on the world, a Single Mom with only a weak wind to guide her and a ragged sail keeping her afloat. She was a walking sitcom my mom. Part Alice, Part One Day at A Time with a small helping of Sanford and Son on the side with a whimsical splash of Partridge Family, that was how she played us off. Actually it was closer to a really bad episode of COPS mixed in with just about any bad drug movie made in the 70’s. There were guys that were way overcompensating for something with their flashy cars and their silk jackets. You had scores of drugs and parties, all attended by just some ugly, ugly people who had to have money cause I know the drugs didn’t buy themselves. But to my mom, we were s sitcom, a nice, happy little show about family. We were freewheeling pals, strolling down the yellow bricked path of life and all she needed was just a little more money to make sure James stayed in clean clothes and a warm bed and that wasn’t too much to ask for while she got back on her feet was it ?
My mom’s feet had slipped out from under her when she was 15 and had spent the better part of a decade doing anything they could to stay out from under her. Her feet, and the rest of her, seemed to be very happy right where they were which was chasing after whatever star to the right she saw and just ran us on till morning. Hoping the grass on the other side of the fence would be greener and possibly cost less an ounce than she paid at the last place. It was an old song and dance and one my grandparents were well used to. I really think they simply saved up what money they could not for retirement or their own future, but for the next time Linda’s Salvation Army of one came knocking so they could give all they could. Each time with a heartfelt stare into my eyes with the same meaningless question. Was I happy ? Was this what I wanted ? Did I want anything else ?
It’s easy now to look back and see the rope they were dropping down to me. In retrospection it is so clear that they were scared for me but had no Earthly idea how to save me from her. All they knew was they were supposed to ask and all I knew was that asking did no good at all. There was no way I could disconnect myself from my mother, She was my mother for god’s sake and she had carried me this far through city after city. It seemed ungrateful to me to simply cut and run when the going got tough; even though the tough had gotten going years ago. It just didn’t seem possible for me to not be connected to my mom as she was my mom. This life was a ball and chain I had resigned myself to carry as it was the only thing I had left. The rock I was going to push up that hill my entire life only to have to roll back down over me, crushing what little hope I had saved up to that point. It was just not in my vocabulary to walk away.
It was in my vocabulary to whine soundlessly and look longingly at things I knew I could never have. That I had a whole language of. And my grandparents lived next to a whole school of longing.
Imagine a small boy, black in white in a black and white world looking through a fence. His small hands cling to a chain link world that is surrounding everything he ever wanted. On the other side of his back and white is a universe of color. Boys and girls run freely in the grass as teachers look on wearing masks of concern and benevolence. Laughter flows freely from their mouth like water from a brook, so unlike the desert of my discontent. I look on from my sepia filled world and see the normalcy that fills the rest of the world and want it so bad that blood flows from my palms as I grip the fence even tighter. But even the blood has no color, so no importance to me.
My grandparents lived next to a Junior High school and everytime my mother had to spend more than ten minutes begging for money I spent it watching the other kids play. It was better than TV for me, seeing those kids go about their life just living. They woke up each day in the same bed, went to the same school, saw the same kids and then went back home knowing, the next day they would come back and do it all again. It was a ritual I am sure they never gave even ten minutes of thought to, but for me it was more miraculous than any water turned to wine. This idiotic little middle school was my own Quixotian like fantasy. For my life was so filled with storms of great chaos and fury, this small, green stretch of playing field with kids playing on it in the middle of the day was just this side of heaven.
But like Heaven, I was never going to go to that school, so it was simply a daydream. Another subtle torture device that life used to remind me exactly where my place was. These moments was where I saw what I most wanted, and knew even if I had it, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. But this time I watched, and I watched. Something had changed since last time I stood at this fence and gazed out in silent desire, somehow the kids on the other side were not the same. For they were no longer other kids or older shaped people anymore. They were no longer cooler, older kids who had their own bikes and talked about more important things than little kids talked about. Somehow the people on the other side of the fence had stopped being so old and somehow became more my age. Somehow the age gap had closed and I saw instead of some other people, I saw something infinitely more destructive than any daydream.
I saw a reflection.
As some older kids somewhere they were fine with me. As nameless older people they were fine to fantasize about, as they were things I could never have. Somehow though they had ceased to be older like things and had become more like me. We wore some of the same clothes and were singing some of the same songs. As things over there I was fine but as something I could be but wasn’t…well that was a different story. They no longer were images that had no connection my life, now each and every one was a reminder on how much not them I really was. This time it wasn’t a TV show it was a horror movie and each minute it became more and more apparent that it was a life I was never going to have.
And for the first time in my life, I found I wanted something for me.
Most kids grow up with a healthy dose of selfishness in them in varying degrees. It comes from the inborn desire to voice to the world your dissatisfaction at the present condition at the top of your lungs. It starts with a shrill and piercing scream that can rattle a small apartment signifying many, many things. It can mean I am hungry, cold, wet, tired, alone or just cranky. It could mean I have been alone far too long and desire comfort or it could mean without the use of language I somehow have to get across to you that I am very, very unhappy with the state our life is in at the present moment. It can mean I can’t believe that I was brought into this world against my will and am forced to live in this day to day black hole that is called your life. It could mean I can’t believe I was born only to wish so hard to die. Or it could just mean I don’t like you very much.
It could mean all of that and more and there are different ways you can respond to such cries. I am going to quote Dr. Spock here, the baby doctor not the Star Trek character, on what you should do when an infant cries.
You really can't spoil a newborn. In the first 6 months of life, infants experience hunger, coldness, and other physical discomforts as pressing needs. Spoiling depends on the child having an idea about cause and effect: "If I cry and fuss, I can get what I want even if my mother doesn't want to give it to me." Young infants cannot begin to form these kind of ideas about cause and effect.
See how that reads. It’s simple. A baby needs something, get it for them cause they are just not developed enough to understand cause and effect yet. It isn’t about control, it isn’t about attention, it isn’t about learning a lesson. It’s about a child not just wanting but needing something and not able to get it. My mom’s response was that I cried a lot when I was a kid so she put a radio in my room so I would get used to sleeping with music playing.
I learned early crying got you nowhere.
The concept of things for me didn’t really gel in my head as everything revolved around my mom and her revolving door of insanity. If I was given money for Christmas, there were bills that were more pressing. If I wanted a cake for my birthday it was always balanced against how much it would cost and if she remembered the day in the first place. I learned young that what I wanted in the world took second, third and sometimes last place in the long run of things. And the idea of voicing what I wanted was something I never approached with any real desire. For let me finish what Dr. Spock said about child rearing.
Young infants cannot begin to form these kind of ideas about cause and effect. They can, however, learn about basic trust or mistrust.
Apprehension I had a ton of, but trust, trust was a completely other kind of animal.
But this I wanted. No, I needed this. In some unformed way in the back of my 12 year old mind I knew that if I didn’t get this now, didn’t find out a normal of some kind, I was never going to. I didn’t know it in words or concepts I could explain, I just knew it. I knew that there was something in me and that in a few years it would be set. Like modeling clay I was still soft and malleable inside, and in a few years I wouldn’t be. I knew that in a few years I would be stuck like this, some black wearing, anti social freak who had no idea what the world was like and hated it for being something that was unknowable. I would be an outcast among outcasts. I would be bitter, angry and worst than all that, alone. Alone in a world that wouldn’t want me any more than I wanted it. I needed this, I needed this more than air and water combined. I needed this or sooner or later I was just going to die.
The difference between those two choices lied in this.
The problem was the end run around. Now in football an end run around is an attempt to advance the ball by running around the end of the line. In the military and end run around is going to a higher ranking officer than the one right above you in hopes of cutting of your direct superior. In my life it meant getting to my grandparents without alerting my mother of my intentions.
For I knew that in my mom’s eyes, I was not me. In my mom’s eyes I was nothing more than an extension of her. The thought I might have needs and wants that were opposite of her own would have been a violation of everything she thought we held dear. It would have been an indication that I had no loyalty at all to her and her life choices. It would have been a huge screaming sign that told her in the end, I just didn’t like her.
It probably would say all those things because they were all true and she didn’t want to have to face any of them.
And now I found myself between another type of promised land and where I dwelled. But unlike heaven this wasn’t a mythical place where all things were better in the end. It wasn’t anything that was so intangible as that. What I saw this time was the only thing it could be.
Sanctuary.
I was no better than a political prisoner dashing past the armed guards on the wall, my breaths coming in deep ragged gulps of air. My heart pounding in my throat as I see the promised land right in front of me and the sound of weapons fire behind me. I knew there was no way I could just go and announce my intention to leave. There was no way she would let a slight like that pass without a cost and I wasn’t sure I could actual pay if I got caught. All I had was a mad dash for the border and hope that my legs were better than her aim.
That and I knew there was no way in her drunken state she was going to be awake anytime before noon which gave me a whole morning to lay out my plan with my grandparents without fear of her busting in somewhere in the middle of it. We were an East German resistance movement, the three of us huddled in their tiny kitchen trying to figure out a way to get me out from under her grasp without the inevitable fallout of her rage and disappointment at not getting her way. In the end it was my grandfather that figured it out. It was like dealing with a baby…or possibly a rather large ape.
Either one will do in this case.
My grandfather explained there was no way she was going to let me go without getting anything in return. She knew I was more than a meal ticket, I was the golden ticket and as long as she had me under her thumb she was allowed all the chocolate she could eat for as long as she could. The concept of just cutting her off and leaving me to suffer with her was just not an option to my grandparents, I never had the heart to tell them that she would have cut us loose at the drop of a dimebag, and in fact had done so several times in the past. But my grandfather was right, she perceived me as an advantage and she was not going to just let it slip away unless she got something else. Or as my grandfather said, We have to give her something in this hand so she forgets what’s in the other.
I like the big ape picture myself.
So that evening my grandfather layed it out to her. He explained that I was going to stay here so she could go out on her own and find her elusive feet and get them under her. She would not be burdened with having a not so small child anymore in tow and I would get to go to a real school and make a go at a real life. She explained that there was no way she could make it out there on her own, she had no way to support herself. He explained that the small fortune they had been spending on me would not go away, only I would. My mom did the math and in a transaction that was more like a slave trade than it was a discussion about the rest of my life I had been cut loose from my mom and for the first time was adrift in an ocean of my own making.
And I had no idea what to do.
I watched my mom leave the next night, I watched until the lights of her car got very small and then vanished into the darkness. We never said good-bye or anything. She just stared at me as she left, possibly for the first time realizing, she didn't know me at all. I watched and watched wondering if she was going to come back for me. I didn’t know if I missed my mom or was scared she was going to come after me like some James Cameron villain that doesn’t know when the 3rd act of the movie is over. Either way, all I knew was that she was gone, which meant only one thing.
There was going to be no one else to blame besides myself.
A chance to die…
Duran Duran
I had, of course, died before.
Well to be more precise I had been killed many times before. In my past I had created myself several times over in a vain attempt to be more of something I thought I was lacking. Taking from one place and giving to another in my mind, I hoped to somehow create a me that was not lacking in those small parts that make up a man. Like most things in my life, I hoped it was a matter of math and that sooner or later a workable equation could be found. It was all a matter of social science.
I had tried to be smart only to find myself pulled out of normal classes into advanced courses and away from my not so smart friends. I found myself surrounded by people who were even more anti social than I was but didn’t seemed hampered by it. I did what I could to produce the stupidity I thought would get me out of the classes but instead of ignorance they classified it as willfulness and then as a behavior problem. In the end I found myself in a whole different type of class, one that was filled with juvenile delinquents and drug wasteoids but in the end just another class my friends weren’t in. The funny part of that story was my mom dragged me out of the city less than a year later without even a chance to say good bye to anyone, so my great quest to find the correct kind of stupid in garnered me the same net result I would have made by staying smart, nothing. In the end the advance courses as well as the behavioral detention prepared me for a lesson far greater than those found on any test. They taught me how to pull my heart out and keep moving.
I had tried to be funny, on the chance it would be almost impossible for someone to beat someone else while laughing. I found out later this was in fact very doable. The first funny thing I tried out was a Dan Aykroyd, Saturday Night Live skit during one of my mom’s ever present parties. Party is too controlled a word for what they actually were, a collection of drunken bikers who had nothing better to do then smoke and drink themselves into a complete stupor every night. About once every four days the circuit would round back to our place and no matter what the day, school night or not, the house was filled with middle aged drug addicts all vainly trying not to look into each other’s eyes on the off chance they saw something they recognized. At first these people were cool and tolerable for many reasons. One, they were always happy. They laughed a lot and had that decibel too loud voice drunk people have. One click below screaming they were always, HEY LITTLE MAN WHAT’S UP !!, or WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP SO LATE ??, or my personal favorite, SHIT MAN ARE YOU ALREADY GOING TO SCHOOL, WHAT THE FUCK TIME IS IT ? Another reason I liked them was that my mom was forced to pretend to be a normal mom while they were around. Since these people, these low life scum bags were the center of her life, THEIR opinion were the ones that counted. It didn’t matter if every teacher I had at school wondered why I was so weird or my grandparents worried that she was neglecting me to the point of criminal prosecution. Instead these middle class junkies were the ones she craved acceptance from so while they were around, she became a mom.
Not my mom mind you, but a mom nonetheless.
She would talk about how proud she was of me and how smart I was, though she hadn’t signed one of my report cards in over 4 years. She would go on about how smart my teachers thought I was despite the fact she hadn’t woken up a minute before noon since I was 7 and missed every parent-teacher conference she was invited to. For the few moments they were there and I was visible I was her son and she was proud. I found it odd that the things she was proud of had little to do with who I actually were, but leave people stranded in the middle of the desert for weeks they will drink the sand cause there is nothing left for them to drink. It was nice to hear her say anything nice about me, even if she was incorrect about it. So I thought if I could be funny-funny kid I might just be able to score a Get out of a Beating Card.
That’s a reference from the game of Life where you get driven around in a car that has no door handles and watch your life speed by as your mother buries the speedometer in some Peter Pan, Kamikaze effort to stop the aging process. In the end you find yourself stranded on the wrong side of childhood looking at a pack of high school kids laughing at you as cranberry juice spills down over your eyes. It’s a game for the whole dysfunctional family.
So here I was, a 9 year old Steve Martin, ready for my ten minutes at the Improv. Instead of a brick wall with a tacky neon sign it was our living room fireplace with a tacky brass duck my mom had shoplifted from Gemco while stoned one day. Her circle of friends had pulled up some carpet around me, cause they were fucked up beyond belief and the thought a nine year old kid was going to tell jokes at 3 in the morning seemed perfectly rational to them. My mom smiled that gentle buzz smile that most chronic alkies have when in the middle of a four day binge, the guy she was fucking at the time sat next to her, his eyes half opened, beer suds on his Village People mustache. They all sat there, one held breath of anticipation. I cleared my throat, looked at my mom and said.
Linda you ignorant slut, who did you sleep with to get this job anyway ?
He died halfway down the hall as the sounds of her friends thunderous laughing was drowned out by the wet slapping sounds my cleats made as she slammed them against any surface of my body she could find. My legs, my arms, my face. I missed two days of school after that since the swelling and cuts looked like nothing this side of being mauled by a mountain lion would produce. Funny, funny kid wasn’t even an hour old when he was killed.
I had been killed many times before. Yet like a mythical phoenix I rose from my own ashes.
Only to have some jackass douse me liberally with gasoline and light me aflame moments after. Time and time again I had played this game with myself. Sitting there in my head, nursing third degree burns I first told myself I was never going to move again. I was going to die here in my mind. Light years away from the people who tried to hurt me I would simply go further and further within myself and one day, I would just forget how to find my way back. I would lie on my bed for hours and hours, nearly catatonic in my oblivion of the passing of time. I figured the less I moved the less I would hurt. And it turned out to be true in a lot of ways.
But after awhile my head would peek out of my charred and blackened shell and I would look around and marvel and the light and vitality of the world around me. I would see people, tons of people just…living. They had friends and jobs and lives and just stuff. They went from here to there and did what they wanted and it looked so damned easy. I would first stew at what they had and I didn’t and then I would simmer in resentment.
Then let sit in own juices for a few weeks, remove from heat, allow to cool and then add a liberal dose of peer pressure with half a class of acceptance. Mix in some sexual confusion for flavor and then smother in denial until you’re ready to put it back in the steam cooker once more.
And that my friends is how you make a new life.
You just one day, forget how much the last one hurt and make a new one. And then you practice the shocked and terrified face you’ll make when the inevitable homicide occurs. It’s important to have that look down, it’s going to be the one thing you take away from all of this later. A wall of last moments, little Polaroid’s of lives once lived. Different parts of yourself put up and burned at the social stake one at a time. One by one until the real you is left. The you that has nothing but raw and undiluted pain for blood covered in a thin layer of envy and jealousy. A flesh and blood balloon of a skin that covers your wounds so tightly and so completely that it only takes one prick, one tiny little point of pain to have it burst under you. And the life you so carefully crafted out of a paper mache concoction of hopes and delusions goes up in an explosion that can only be described as reality.
One after another after another. I had been killed many times before.
But this time, this time…come on say it with me….you know what’s next.
This time it was going to be different.
My mother’s last adventure had left her high and dry. Actually her last adventure left her with a warrant and fleeing local authorities but where my mother was concerned these little details never slowed her down. She just pulled up stakes wherever she was, grabbed me and took off right out of Dodge. It never mattered to her what I was doing or how ingrained I was into the community around me at the time. The only thing that mattered was we had to leave and leave we did. Leaving was the other thing I did well.
Standing very quietly and not drawing attention to myself was the other.
So with very little fanfare and even less warning we ended up in Livermore, the town my grandparents lived. This was a comfortable ritual for my mom. She would sweep into town, a whirlwind of half stories and future dreams. She would parade me around like a prize dog showing how clean my teeth were and that my pedigree was simply getting better and better the more schools I was exposed to and if she was asking for money it was for me and not her. Never her, no sirrie Bob. She was the saint adrift on the world, a Single Mom with only a weak wind to guide her and a ragged sail keeping her afloat. She was a walking sitcom my mom. Part Alice, Part One Day at A Time with a small helping of Sanford and Son on the side with a whimsical splash of Partridge Family, that was how she played us off. Actually it was closer to a really bad episode of COPS mixed in with just about any bad drug movie made in the 70’s. There were guys that were way overcompensating for something with their flashy cars and their silk jackets. You had scores of drugs and parties, all attended by just some ugly, ugly people who had to have money cause I know the drugs didn’t buy themselves. But to my mom, we were s sitcom, a nice, happy little show about family. We were freewheeling pals, strolling down the yellow bricked path of life and all she needed was just a little more money to make sure James stayed in clean clothes and a warm bed and that wasn’t too much to ask for while she got back on her feet was it ?
My mom’s feet had slipped out from under her when she was 15 and had spent the better part of a decade doing anything they could to stay out from under her. Her feet, and the rest of her, seemed to be very happy right where they were which was chasing after whatever star to the right she saw and just ran us on till morning. Hoping the grass on the other side of the fence would be greener and possibly cost less an ounce than she paid at the last place. It was an old song and dance and one my grandparents were well used to. I really think they simply saved up what money they could not for retirement or their own future, but for the next time Linda’s Salvation Army of one came knocking so they could give all they could. Each time with a heartfelt stare into my eyes with the same meaningless question. Was I happy ? Was this what I wanted ? Did I want anything else ?
It’s easy now to look back and see the rope they were dropping down to me. In retrospection it is so clear that they were scared for me but had no Earthly idea how to save me from her. All they knew was they were supposed to ask and all I knew was that asking did no good at all. There was no way I could disconnect myself from my mother, She was my mother for god’s sake and she had carried me this far through city after city. It seemed ungrateful to me to simply cut and run when the going got tough; even though the tough had gotten going years ago. It just didn’t seem possible for me to not be connected to my mom as she was my mom. This life was a ball and chain I had resigned myself to carry as it was the only thing I had left. The rock I was going to push up that hill my entire life only to have to roll back down over me, crushing what little hope I had saved up to that point. It was just not in my vocabulary to walk away.
It was in my vocabulary to whine soundlessly and look longingly at things I knew I could never have. That I had a whole language of. And my grandparents lived next to a whole school of longing.
Imagine a small boy, black in white in a black and white world looking through a fence. His small hands cling to a chain link world that is surrounding everything he ever wanted. On the other side of his back and white is a universe of color. Boys and girls run freely in the grass as teachers look on wearing masks of concern and benevolence. Laughter flows freely from their mouth like water from a brook, so unlike the desert of my discontent. I look on from my sepia filled world and see the normalcy that fills the rest of the world and want it so bad that blood flows from my palms as I grip the fence even tighter. But even the blood has no color, so no importance to me.
My grandparents lived next to a Junior High school and everytime my mother had to spend more than ten minutes begging for money I spent it watching the other kids play. It was better than TV for me, seeing those kids go about their life just living. They woke up each day in the same bed, went to the same school, saw the same kids and then went back home knowing, the next day they would come back and do it all again. It was a ritual I am sure they never gave even ten minutes of thought to, but for me it was more miraculous than any water turned to wine. This idiotic little middle school was my own Quixotian like fantasy. For my life was so filled with storms of great chaos and fury, this small, green stretch of playing field with kids playing on it in the middle of the day was just this side of heaven.
But like Heaven, I was never going to go to that school, so it was simply a daydream. Another subtle torture device that life used to remind me exactly where my place was. These moments was where I saw what I most wanted, and knew even if I had it, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. But this time I watched, and I watched. Something had changed since last time I stood at this fence and gazed out in silent desire, somehow the kids on the other side were not the same. For they were no longer other kids or older shaped people anymore. They were no longer cooler, older kids who had their own bikes and talked about more important things than little kids talked about. Somehow the people on the other side of the fence had stopped being so old and somehow became more my age. Somehow the age gap had closed and I saw instead of some other people, I saw something infinitely more destructive than any daydream.
I saw a reflection.
As some older kids somewhere they were fine with me. As nameless older people they were fine to fantasize about, as they were things I could never have. Somehow though they had ceased to be older like things and had become more like me. We wore some of the same clothes and were singing some of the same songs. As things over there I was fine but as something I could be but wasn’t…well that was a different story. They no longer were images that had no connection my life, now each and every one was a reminder on how much not them I really was. This time it wasn’t a TV show it was a horror movie and each minute it became more and more apparent that it was a life I was never going to have.
And for the first time in my life, I found I wanted something for me.
Most kids grow up with a healthy dose of selfishness in them in varying degrees. It comes from the inborn desire to voice to the world your dissatisfaction at the present condition at the top of your lungs. It starts with a shrill and piercing scream that can rattle a small apartment signifying many, many things. It can mean I am hungry, cold, wet, tired, alone or just cranky. It could mean I have been alone far too long and desire comfort or it could mean without the use of language I somehow have to get across to you that I am very, very unhappy with the state our life is in at the present moment. It can mean I can’t believe that I was brought into this world against my will and am forced to live in this day to day black hole that is called your life. It could mean I can’t believe I was born only to wish so hard to die. Or it could just mean I don’t like you very much.
It could mean all of that and more and there are different ways you can respond to such cries. I am going to quote Dr. Spock here, the baby doctor not the Star Trek character, on what you should do when an infant cries.
You really can't spoil a newborn. In the first 6 months of life, infants experience hunger, coldness, and other physical discomforts as pressing needs. Spoiling depends on the child having an idea about cause and effect: "If I cry and fuss, I can get what I want even if my mother doesn't want to give it to me." Young infants cannot begin to form these kind of ideas about cause and effect.
See how that reads. It’s simple. A baby needs something, get it for them cause they are just not developed enough to understand cause and effect yet. It isn’t about control, it isn’t about attention, it isn’t about learning a lesson. It’s about a child not just wanting but needing something and not able to get it. My mom’s response was that I cried a lot when I was a kid so she put a radio in my room so I would get used to sleeping with music playing.
I learned early crying got you nowhere.
The concept of things for me didn’t really gel in my head as everything revolved around my mom and her revolving door of insanity. If I was given money for Christmas, there were bills that were more pressing. If I wanted a cake for my birthday it was always balanced against how much it would cost and if she remembered the day in the first place. I learned young that what I wanted in the world took second, third and sometimes last place in the long run of things. And the idea of voicing what I wanted was something I never approached with any real desire. For let me finish what Dr. Spock said about child rearing.
Young infants cannot begin to form these kind of ideas about cause and effect. They can, however, learn about basic trust or mistrust.
Apprehension I had a ton of, but trust, trust was a completely other kind of animal.
But this I wanted. No, I needed this. In some unformed way in the back of my 12 year old mind I knew that if I didn’t get this now, didn’t find out a normal of some kind, I was never going to. I didn’t know it in words or concepts I could explain, I just knew it. I knew that there was something in me and that in a few years it would be set. Like modeling clay I was still soft and malleable inside, and in a few years I wouldn’t be. I knew that in a few years I would be stuck like this, some black wearing, anti social freak who had no idea what the world was like and hated it for being something that was unknowable. I would be an outcast among outcasts. I would be bitter, angry and worst than all that, alone. Alone in a world that wouldn’t want me any more than I wanted it. I needed this, I needed this more than air and water combined. I needed this or sooner or later I was just going to die.
The difference between those two choices lied in this.
The problem was the end run around. Now in football an end run around is an attempt to advance the ball by running around the end of the line. In the military and end run around is going to a higher ranking officer than the one right above you in hopes of cutting of your direct superior. In my life it meant getting to my grandparents without alerting my mother of my intentions.
For I knew that in my mom’s eyes, I was not me. In my mom’s eyes I was nothing more than an extension of her. The thought I might have needs and wants that were opposite of her own would have been a violation of everything she thought we held dear. It would have been an indication that I had no loyalty at all to her and her life choices. It would have been a huge screaming sign that told her in the end, I just didn’t like her.
It probably would say all those things because they were all true and she didn’t want to have to face any of them.
And now I found myself between another type of promised land and where I dwelled. But unlike heaven this wasn’t a mythical place where all things were better in the end. It wasn’t anything that was so intangible as that. What I saw this time was the only thing it could be.
Sanctuary.
I was no better than a political prisoner dashing past the armed guards on the wall, my breaths coming in deep ragged gulps of air. My heart pounding in my throat as I see the promised land right in front of me and the sound of weapons fire behind me. I knew there was no way I could just go and announce my intention to leave. There was no way she would let a slight like that pass without a cost and I wasn’t sure I could actual pay if I got caught. All I had was a mad dash for the border and hope that my legs were better than her aim.
That and I knew there was no way in her drunken state she was going to be awake anytime before noon which gave me a whole morning to lay out my plan with my grandparents without fear of her busting in somewhere in the middle of it. We were an East German resistance movement, the three of us huddled in their tiny kitchen trying to figure out a way to get me out from under her grasp without the inevitable fallout of her rage and disappointment at not getting her way. In the end it was my grandfather that figured it out. It was like dealing with a baby…or possibly a rather large ape.
Either one will do in this case.
My grandfather explained there was no way she was going to let me go without getting anything in return. She knew I was more than a meal ticket, I was the golden ticket and as long as she had me under her thumb she was allowed all the chocolate she could eat for as long as she could. The concept of just cutting her off and leaving me to suffer with her was just not an option to my grandparents, I never had the heart to tell them that she would have cut us loose at the drop of a dimebag, and in fact had done so several times in the past. But my grandfather was right, she perceived me as an advantage and she was not going to just let it slip away unless she got something else. Or as my grandfather said, We have to give her something in this hand so she forgets what’s in the other.
I like the big ape picture myself.
So that evening my grandfather layed it out to her. He explained that I was going to stay here so she could go out on her own and find her elusive feet and get them under her. She would not be burdened with having a not so small child anymore in tow and I would get to go to a real school and make a go at a real life. She explained that there was no way she could make it out there on her own, she had no way to support herself. He explained that the small fortune they had been spending on me would not go away, only I would. My mom did the math and in a transaction that was more like a slave trade than it was a discussion about the rest of my life I had been cut loose from my mom and for the first time was adrift in an ocean of my own making.
And I had no idea what to do.
I watched my mom leave the next night, I watched until the lights of her car got very small and then vanished into the darkness. We never said good-bye or anything. She just stared at me as she left, possibly for the first time realizing, she didn't know me at all. I watched and watched wondering if she was going to come back for me. I didn’t know if I missed my mom or was scared she was going to come after me like some James Cameron villain that doesn’t know when the 3rd act of the movie is over. Either way, all I knew was that she was gone, which meant only one thing.
There was going to be no one else to blame besides myself.
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