More Layers

You will, of course, recall that I was sharing some writing I have been doing with you guys back in October. Well. Since I have nothing good to blog about today, I thought perhaps I'd blast you with another bit of that writing. Much has been skipped-- stuff that is too personal. You will undoubtedly think "holy crap, what is worse than this stuff she's sharing today?!?" Well. Trust me that there are things that are far less nostalgic and much less like the lives of most folks who grew up in the 70s. :) Anyhoo. Here is a bit... enjoy may not be the right word, but whatever. (I've been watching Foamy cartoons, so I have a bit of a Squirrely Wrath attitude. Sorry 'bout that.)


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I see my mother in the morning, still wearing last night's makeup and hair still slightly styled, sprayed with Aqua Net but sticking out a bit. I sometimes now see that same wild hair in my own mirror, waking up to feed the cat, open the door to let her meowingly out. Mom's eyelids are a bit crepe-y and the blue shadow brings out the lines. I always remove any eye makeup because I am afraid to see that same face. She looks tired, and smokes her morning cigarette while I crunch on sugary cereal. I also see her pulling the stolen food out from under her yellowbeige trench coat. She has a severe kidney infection and cannot work but we do not qualify for food stamps so she must steal packets of instant mashed potatoes and flour to make lumpy potato soup and drop biscuits. I steal matchbox cars from the same store, and a tube of flavored lipgloss she makes me throw away because I tell her I found it.

We move into a house in a row of rundown slat houses, painted yellow-green, with a refrigerator that still has good grapes in the bottom drawer, which I eat. It is the last fruit I will have for a long time. My sister, then about 16, gets a job as a waitress at a BBQ joint and when the manager, sexual advances rebuffed, fires her, sister's boyfriend steals loads of BBQ which we eat in front of the TV. It is the best thing I have ever eaten, and I lick greasy sauce from thin, tiny fingers. There are spiders in this house that bite me as I roll over on them in bed at night; I wake with tiny red welts and a crushed spider body sticking to my sweaty arms, legs.

Around this time my sister calls my father, who is living with his new wife, to ask for help, some money for food, for rent. He tells her Ask the guy you're fucking to give you some money. She will not speak to him for years, and even then, she does not accept his guilty apology. My father lives with a woman who has a silver metal Christmas tree, who alternates the colors of the Christmas lights and garlands and balls every year. One year hot pink, the next deep electric blue. Then red, gold. Finally, she mixes all the colors on the tree which spins on a little electronic platform. He goes on a vacation to Bermuda, and while he's there, a hurricane trashes the island. We are happy, think of that ruined vacation while we pick up return-deposit bottles alongside the road for money to buy food. Five cents a bottle. Ten cents for certain bottles.

I lie on the floor and look up to see my sister's boyfriend's balls, red and squishy, protruding from the holes in his cutoff denim shorts. He shifts and sees me lying there. Crosses his legs. But the balls do not hide, but pinch, blue-purple, in the corners of the crotch. I peek again; the denim is frayed and the shorts very short. My mother, sister and their boyfriends smoke pot while listening to Three Dog Night and Pink Floyd. I am probably about six years old. This boyfriend and his friend who my mother covets and sometimes thinks she loves (he is younger, has a diamond earring and blonde hair) will cross paths with drug dealers who come by, angry at some payment not made, and shoot bullet holes in our house. I am lying in the porcelain, clawed foot bathtub, lined in foamy mattress. The boyfriends hide in the abandoned house next door and fire a sawed-off shotgun at the ineffectual drug dealers. They do not see, until it is too late, the boyfriends hiding in the abandoned house, where we kids have been forbidden to play because its slat wooden floors are breaking-through to the lower crawlspace in spots. My mother and sister say the shotgun lights up the dark Mississippi night. The drug dealers leave us alone.

The abandoned house smells of rat turds and rotting figs from the overgrown tree that pokes its wild branches into the front window. The unripe figs drip a gluey substance on your fingers if you pull one from the branch; there are never any sweetly ripe ones; they seem to go directly from gluey-green-hard to rotten on the ground. The smell of the house is strangely a cross between black pepper and sweetness. This house has cut glass doorknobs which seem like magic and I find a rhinestone button on the floor in a huge pile of debris-- old newspapers, rotting clothes.

Later those two boyfriends, returned to Kentucky, will try to rob a liquor store with the same sawed off shotgun. My sister's boyfriend falls into a ditch, breaks his leg. The one with blonde hair and diamond earring is not caught, immediately. They both end up in prison and my mother no longer covets his youth and blondeness.

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People ask me: is this fiction, or real? I reply A little of both. What is real, to a six-year-old lying in a room filled with 1970s pot smoke? What can you remember that you do not embellish? I ask them back What was your childhood like? I really want to know.
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