ugh

as anyone could probably guess i am further ahead on this dumb life story thing than i post...the more i write, the more things i remember that seem so relevant to the person i see myself as, and it's really hard to put it all in chronological order since i am not a schooled writer and i don't know any other way to put it than chronologically.
and sometimes i feel icky about it.
you have all these thoughts in your head...all this perspective and all these beliefs about how events in your life really transpired, and writing it down has forced me to think about some things in different ways...i'm not really going anywhere with that thought, but i will just say that somedays i am afraid of anyone reading about my life, or the way i saw it, at least. i will keep posting, however, because it feels like letting it all go...giving it all to cyberspace...
i still feel...ugh...

Jimmy and the Grateful Dead show I never saw

Needless to say, left to my own devices I got an early start on all those coming of age rituals that my eleven year old counterparts would not be so bold as to take part in. My best friend at that time was two years older that I, and had a brother that was a year older than her. We started out drinking in the garage after her mom went to sleep, and ended up doing naughty things with boys in just about no time at all. My best friends brother was the only person who wanted to show me any attention. We would talk about our parents and the injustices we had to endure. We wrestled a lot. So when you catch your daughter wrestling with the neighbor boy, take appropriate action. We would just cuddle sometimes and before long I was the only girl in the sixth grade who had gone ’all-the-way’. I felt special and better and smarter than all those girls I went to school with. I knew so much more than them. I was cool. It didn’t stay a secret for long. I told my mom one day, over lunch. She was more surprised than I think she had a right to be. She called the police and turned him in cause he was three years older than me. He couldn’t be alone with kids until he was 18. He was a kid himself. It wasn’t fair . We met secretly a couple times under the bleachers ( ha ha, seriously, though) and talked but after awhile quit talking. He was my good friend, and I felt very sad and guilty. They treated him like a rapist or something. He was older, and should have had better sense, I guess, but he was just as starved for positive attention as I was, so we were similar creatures with similar needs. I wanted to grow up too fast, though. I always felt like people ignored me because I was a kid. Didn’t value my existence or something. Anyhow, I became a pretty wild and promiscuous child from that point. I think my mom felt like it was already too late to prevent the worst, and as long as I kept taking my birth control and didn’t get arrested, I was on my own. It’s a wonder that I didn’t end up pregnant or incarcerated, but really, as wild as I was, I wasn’t stupid and only found myself in a couple dicey situations. Nothing too traumatic. I got used to being in charge of me. I want to write something here about Jimmy. Jimmy, a.k.a. Space, was my mom’s boyfriend for a couple of years. He lived with us. He was a space cadet with a heart of gold. He was thoughtful in a bumbling way, and he loved us all. Jimmy worked at a nursery supply manufacturing place and rode his bike eleven miles to work rain or shine. He bought us school clothes and gave us some money for our pockets (we only ever got food stamps from mom). He treated us all very well. When the nursery job ended (I don’t know why) he got a job with his brother 45 miles away in Portland, making cabinets. We would drive up and see him every weekend and he would take us all out to eat. He noticed if I did something new and dorky with my hair and said it looked nice. He was that kind of person. Kindness was his trademark. When he started working in Portland my mom started hanging out with a different crowd. She was using more and becoming resentful that Jimmy was always gone. He had a problem with cocaine and I remember her being angry that he spent all his money on it once. They started fighting a lot when he did come home. The last time I saw Jimmy he showed up at the house late at night. My mom had left somewhere but had told me not to let him in if he came because she thought he was on drugs (how ironic, mom). He banged on the door and wanted me to open it. I was kind of afraid…not of him, really, but of what he might say about my mom that would undoubtedly be true. I didn’t let him in. He said it was cold and he had no way to get back to the city and I still didn’t let him in. He slept on the porch all night without a blanket. I feel nauseated just thinking about it. I don’t think of it often. I should have let him in. He loved us. I wish I could find him and make him a part of my family. He deserved better.Meanwhile, my mom hit the bottom. She was using and selling meth to pay the rent, and by this time, I knew what she was up to. She had been busted for possession of marijuana after running a yellow light and was on probation. Now my mom was the only dreadlocked, Volkswagen driving momma in the whole county, so when they got a chance to pull over the van with the ‘bad cop no donut’ sticker, they thanked their lucky stars. She had to go and take a u.a. for her probation officer one day and told me that if she was not back in two hours to clean out all of her stash and paraphernalia from her bedroom, lest her p.o. decided to do a home visit. Sure enough, I had to clean it all out and put it in my own room. Mom spent two days in jail for a dirty u.a. We were partners in crime. Weird, huh? When I was 13, we went to Las Vegas to see the Grateful Dead. This was , in her mind, I think, a coming of age ritual for me. She knew I was smoking weed and partying and up until that point she had made it clear that I’d better hide it from her. The funny thing was that I was only allowed to smoke pot; mom was totally against me doing anything else- even smoking cigarettes. Even after we got to the point where I could just walk right into her room and borrow her bong, I still got grounded if she caught me smoking cigarettes. I wonder how she rationalized that. This trip to Vegas was the first time I smoked in front of her. It was also the first time I took the rap for her. This guy Jaime was driving her V-dub, frying on acid, when we pulled into a small town called Alturas, California at about 1 a.m. He came to a flashing red light and stopped….then he just sat there, watching the light blink. Mom told him, “You can go now” but he only sat and stared. Then a honk came from behind. Just a nice courtesy honk. He continued to sit. Mom and the two other guys with us start yelling at him to go go go. The car honks again. It seems like an eternity , but Jaime finally goes. Then the lights begin to flash. We had a cop behind us. They pulled us over and my mom said, “tell them that my bag is yours”. I believe that the cops knew better, but the good little actress that I was, I got written a ticket for possession of more than an ounce of marijuana, possession of illegal prescription drugs, and get this- intent to distribute. They then released me to the custody of my mother. People might get the impression that she is some kind of terrible monster. I used to think that myself, but now I know that she is only a person, and she had her own lessons to learn. She had been with my dad since she was a kid, and had never been in charge of her own life. Sounds like an excuse, I know.

is it the past or is it the truth?

My dad has a work ethic like no one I have ever known. His hands are like some religious shrine in my mind. If I had to isolate one quality that my father had imparted on me, I would have to say respect. Respect for me, respect for you, respect for society at large. When I was 13, a bunch of my friends decided to lie in the middle of a busy street to piss off the people driving their cars. Yeah, it was funny and all, but I couldn’t do it, not because I was afraid of getting my ass busted by my dad, but because it was stupid and disrespectful and I was far too grown up to do something like that. I have a lot of respect and admiration for my dad. It took awhile for me to accept and acknowledge the good things about my dad. He is an alcoholic. I remember being very young….six or seven years old, and hiding out in the blackberry bushes when my dad’s truck pulled in the driveway. He often stopped at the bar after work and we never knew what kind of disposition we would be facing that night. My dad was a mean drunk. He called names, and gave everyone the evil eye. I wouldn’t say that we were physically abused, but his punishments were harsh. We (my sister and I) were spanked bare ass probably around once a week. It was some creepy kind of ritual, looking back on it now. We shared a room, and who ever wasn’t getting their ass whooped had to roll over and look at the wall while the other cried. It was like some twisted thing. Maybe he meant it to be a deterrent to keep us from acting like little shits, or maybe he never put that much thought into it. There were many times he would sneak up behind you when you were doing something wrong, for instance, peeling paint off of the windowsill or something like that and he would thump you right behind the ear with his hard, wide, thick ass middle finger. He wouldn’t even say anything to you…just a quick, painful thump on the soft spot behind your ear. As much respect as my dad taught me, I don’t really think that he treated us that way. I don’t think he thought of us as actual people. Without conveying the wrong idea, I want to say that he treated us a lot like he treated the dog. His goal was to train us. I have never doubted that my dad loves me. He has always been there. He has a great sense of humor, and can be fun to be around. He is a dirty old man. I grew up a few years ago and stopped feeling angry about the effect his alcoholism has had in my life.My parents were together for 13 years. They split when I was ten. I was so happy when they sat us down and told us. Isn’t that twisted. I couldn’t wait. My dad had sat us all down a couple months before that and showed us a can of non-alcoholic beer. He said that he was sorry that he was so mean sometimes and told us that alcohol made him feel angry and that he was going to stop drinking alcoholic beer because he didn’t want us to be afraid of him anymore. It didn’t last. The sad thing is, at that age you don’t really know what ’drunk’ is and it just seems so normal. Even when he said that beer made him mean, I never associated his moods with alcohol. The whole cycle of drunken episode after drunken episode was normalcy as we saw it. That’s just what daddies did. I guess a lot of kids growing up in a combative, hostile environment are relieved when it’s over. But I always felt guilty like I was betraying my dad by feeling free and happy. Walking on eggshells was something he trained us to do, intentionally or not, and the relief that came when mom swept that shit off the floors was a big source of guilt for me. Children, after all are supposed to think that divorce is all their fault and be devastated and pine for the old days of parental co-habitation. I knew it was my dad’s fault, though, and I was glad to be away from him. He was scary. That was how he wanted to bring us up. Scared. Maybe that was all he knew how to do.My mother had a much more permissive style of parenting. I think she felt like a released prisoner herself, after all the years of isolation…my dad disabling her cars and sabotaging any part time jobs she had. My brother was 2 when my parents separated. He’s the only reason I think it went on for two more years. My mom started going to GED classes, and got on welfare and housing to pay the bills. She started to make friends and go out to party on the weekends. I was more responsible that the average ten year old and ended up being responsible for my younger siblings a lot of the time. I liked it enough. It made me feel important. This was around the time that my relationship with my mom began to change. She started treating me like an equal. She made me feel like it was our responsibility to take care of the kids and our house; she made me feel like a partner in that. I liked it. I liked it that she thought I was grown up enough to be in charge of something. As I got older, I became less and less accountable to my mother. She rarely asked where I was going or any of the related questions. Sometimes I would be gone for a couple days out of town with friends and I don’t think she even missed me. She was partying pretty regularly, and she started doing a little meth here and there. I had no knowledge at this early point, but it got worse and worse. She had always smoked a little pot, and never hid it from us. It was her version of drinking a beer is how I remember thinking of it….only she didn’t get pissed off and scare us after she had a bong hit.

Speaking of me....

I decided the other night that I wanted to write something meaningful. Meaningful to me anyhow. When I was a teenager I wrote with such urgency. Teenage angst can be useful in this way….I used to scribble for hours. Nothing terribly interesting, though. It has been years since I perused over those beat up, sometimes duct taped spiral notebooks. In a way, I am kind of ashamed of them. There is nothing out of the ordinary or overly disturbing, I’m sure. I’ve never really gotten a second opinion. Don’t really want one. No, nothing to worry about. But I do know that I have a big, hot ball of shame that is associated with those books, and the idea that someone may read them makes me want to crawl under a rock. I’m not sure why. I must keep them, however. To throw them away would be a crime against myself. Maybe when my own daughter joins the ranks of the angry, desperate, dangerously anxious teenagers I can show her my notebooks and she will believe I was a real person one time, long, long ago. Or not. When I was a teenager, words poured out of me. I feel like I had far more to write about. I wanted to identify with someone so badly, I often wrote to a nameless, faceless, sexless person in my mind. After all, someone had to read it. The shame came from my phantom reader, who without a word was constantly critical. Which makes sense when I remind me that I am the phantom reader. So the notebooks sit as a reminder of the time when I felt so alive that I could create. Is mental anguish the only fuel that will feed my fire? I think that it may be so.
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in the spring. My mother met my father in Billings, Montana three years before that. She had run away from my grandfather and his abusive wife when she was eleven. My grandmother worked three jobs and just couldn’t be there enough. My grandma is by far the most positive person I have had in my life. Like my mother, I was a fiercely independent child, and my grandma never turned her back on me….but I’m getting ahead of myself. My mother had hitchhiked to Montana with a friend from the job corps, and met my biker gang papa at a kegger. How cliché. She was 16 and he was 23. She needed someone older and wiser to make her feel like she could stop running, I guess. My dad taught my mom how to add, subtract and multiply. She is a very intelligent woman, but had never gone to school. Their relationship is a mystery to me in a lot of ways. I don’t remember ever seeing my parents sit on the couch and cuddle or kiss each other hello and goodbye. ( A couple months later I tell my dad this and after a thoughtful moment he confirms it. He looks kind of sad. It makes me sad. I kind of hoped that maybe I just didn‘t remember). My dad was born in South Dakota and raised in Billings his whole life. He was the third oldest in a family of seven kids. They lived up in the hills of Billings back in the Fifties. They didn’t have running water and had to have a weekly bath night just like Little House on the Prairie. Fun, huh? My dad’s parents are still together, and living in Montana. I’ve only been to see them twice. Once when I was nine and again at thirteen. I have guilt associated with that now. They are getting older and I feel I have a responsibility to present them their great-granddaughter. It is always lack of funds, every year, that keeps us from going. And doesn’t that just sound pathetic? My dad is a no bullshit, sometimes painfully frank kind of guy. He does not believe in banks or doctors. He is a very talented welder, well known in his field. He makes shitloads of money but drives a couple old beaters and buys poor people food like ham hocks for dinner. Now being a poor person myself I would like to say that ham hocks and beans are very good, I eat them all the time, and I certainly have not forgotten where I come from, but I only think that after all his years of back breaking, blistering work he would renounce ham hocks all together and eat the more expensive cuts of meat. But there’s my mentality on money for you.