June gets up. She’s got a stricken look on her face. She grabs my hand and puts it in a Lutheran death grip, where her pinky wraps around the outside of my hand so tightly, it chokes my palm. Usually, this particular handhold only happens at the Brookdale Mall. I loathe it, since it ensures that I cannot so much as turn around to look at the lady with the especially interesting makeup and hair.
“What in the world could be going on?” she mutters worriedly as we make our way back to the guard station. She leans forward to speak into the silver vent, and then it speaks back to us. Worrisome things.
“Mrs. Ericson, the inmate you’re trying to see is not allowed visitors today.”
“I beg your pardon?” June is aghast. “There must be some kind of mistake—”
“His privileges have been revoked. Until next week. You can come back then.” The guard says it with a straight face. They don’t give anything away around here. Not even smiles. “I’m sorry.” The guard shakes his head.
“He’s not sorry,” I pipe up. June yanks on my arm. It’s obvious the guy’s not sorry.
June looks around in that way people do when they suddenly find themselves in a moment they could never have expected and are therefore totally unprepared for. A moment without a map. Her shoulders heave, and it looks like she might be about to cry. There’s a lost-slash-wild look in her eye. Something I’ve never seen there before. She’s usually a rock.
She pulls me away from the guard window, her breath laboring hard against the constricting polyester dress, the nylons, and the boxy-toed heels. Even her clip-on earrings look strained. She closes her eyes for a second. She’s probably talking to god right now. And he must have said something back, because suddenly, her energy changes. She makes her way back toward the guard booth.
“I need to see the warden,” she says through the silver vent.
You can see the guard, with his Smokey the Bear hat and heavy golden badge, perform a quick calculus: Likelihood of getting this woman out of here without a scene, times likelihood of the warden seeing her, times risk I’m taking by putting my ass out there even to ask.
He looks from June to me. I call upon my deep reserves of Dickensian ragamuffin pathos and gaze back at him with my most heartbreaking expression.
“Wait here,” he says.
THE WARDEN’S OFFICE IS QUITE LARGE. I have been deposited in a chair toward the back and June is sitting across from the big man’s desk, looking fierce. Make that as fierce as a pastor’s wife can look.
“Warden, what is happening here?” The words come out like a plea; there’s a beseeching tone, like you might have when speaking to god after, say, a hurricane.
“Mrs. Ericson, the inmate, Mr. McMillan”—he shuffles some papers on his desk looking for the right one, the one with the answer to why I can’t see my dad, and finally finds it—“is in solitary confinement.”
Ooh, that doesn’t sound good. June sits back, unsure how to respond to this bit of information.
“He’s being punished,” the warden adds for effect. He looks like any other sixties white guy—Brylcreem, gray two-toned glasses, short-sleeved dress shirt, and pants that are fashionably too short. He’s not an unreasonable man, but even a first grader can tell that there is something about his absolute power as the warden that he enjoys. No—gets off on.
“We came here all the way from Minneapolis, warden.” And just to show our level of financial investment, she adds, “By plane.”
June has a way of sighing while she talks that is both very affecting and sort of exhausting at the same time. You can just feel how much good she’s doing every day out there on the front lines—and for people like my dad, who really haven’t done a thing to deserve it. They’re just the lucky beneficiaries of her serious Christian love. That shit is no joke.
“Ma’am, I’m sor—”
“I brought this little girl five hundred miles to see her daddy”—pan over to me, looking cute in my pigtails and felt hair ribbons—“and I just can’t get back on that plane without this visit.”
“Ma’am,” the warden says feebly, “I appreciate your circumstances. We have rules.”
“She only sees her daddy twice a year. Are you going to do that to this child?” June is starting to raise her voice, something you don’t really want to make a minister’s wife do.
“Ma’am—”
June stands up. She leans over the desk. She’s really up in the warden’s face now! I’ve never seen her like this. I think she’s…she’s…angry.
“I don’t care what he’s done. We’ve come all this way to see this child’s father. You are the warden. You are in charge here. I am asking you, please, can you find it in your heart to let this visit happen? Please.” She’s not begging, she’s appealing to the warden. To his sense of decency, of family, of god, justice, and all things good.
The warden doesn’t answer. Instead, we are ushered out of his office and back into the waiting room. It’s now been almost two hours since we arrived. June is slumped in one of the olive-colored chairs, her hankie in her right hand. She’s not crying, but she’s misty, more out of frustration than anything else.
“Are we gonna get to see Daddy?” I ask. I’m awfully concerned about whether I’m going to get the Kentucky Fried Chicken they order in for the inmates and their families on visiting day.
“I don’t know, Tracy. We’re waiting to see what the warden says.” There’s no mean-spiritedness in her. She’s a woman of faith, so this must be what faith looks like. No bad-mouthing, no calculating odds, no wavering at all. Just a simple standing up for yourself and holding on to an inner yes just one more time than you hear a no.
A guard shows up in the doorway to the waiting room. The one with the Smokey the Bear hat. We look up at him expectantly.
“The warden says to tell you the inmate will be right down.” The guard smiles.
June lets out a loud sigh. “Oh, thank you, Lord.” When she says it, it’s not taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Thank you, Lord.” No, she’s praising the Jesus she knows who can walk on water and multiply loaves and fishes and convince the warden at a maximum-security prison to let a man out of solitary to visit his little girl. She scoops me into her arms and nuzzles me close. “You’re going to get to see your daddy after all.”
And she sways back and forth as she hugs me tightly.
Good thing, too, because this is a really cute dress I have on, and my dad’s really going to like it.
I JUST FELL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. Accidentally. With a guy on my computer screen.
I am at my TV news job, killing time while waiting for the next car chase or plane crash to happen, when my girlfriend Lisa and I start talking about guys. Specifically, how I should find myself one. I am, after all, thirty-nine years old. The odds of having a marriage that lasts for a lifetime are getting better every day.
I’ve been single for a few months, since I broke up with Bryan, a musician who came over one evening “just to jam” and basically never left. He and I started a band together, and while our music was actually pretty amazing, we found out why people say to never date your bandmate. You’ll want to kill them, that’s why.
The relationship ended when I discovered we’d been having a little misunderstanding for the past three years: I thought we were more or less engaged, and he thought we were just filling time until the real thing comes along.
Whoopsy-fuck!
“You should date online,” Lisa says, sensing that enough time has passed since the Bryan debacle.
“No, I shouldn’t,” I say. “Look at me. You think there’s any guy I’m going to be interested in online?” Sometimes I think I’m so different from everyone else just because of my unusual childhood and my alternative hair.
“Yeah, I do,” she snaps back. “Here.” She turns the computer toward me. “Have a look. You can use my login.”
Filling the screen of her computer is the home page of a popular dating website—the one that’s like meetin
g someone at the office. I guess it’s better than the site that’s more like meeting someone in a bar, but not as good as the one that’s more like meeting someone at Starbucks. There’s nothing else to do at the moment, however, so I think to myself, Fine, I’ll check it out.
I start clicking around, paging through men. Dozens and dozens of them. Click. Click. Click. Not one of them is interesting to me. There are UNGs galore—chubby, balding, a little past their prime. There are even some “cute” guys, but they’re not really my type. Too long on working out and too short on working in. There’s nothing. Nada. Zip. Until…
Wait. Who’s that?
(Don’t click it. You’ll never be the same.)
The picture stops me in my tracks. There’s something so wide-eyed, so woodland-creature about him. He’s like a magical elf king, with satyr rising. Equal parts indie-rocker Beck and Brit-rocker Liam Gallagher. Which is to say, he’s a guy a normal American girl probably would have paged right by with little more than a note to self saying 25 percent gay, 35 percent freak. She most certainly would not have said 45 percent big dick.
Me, though, I’m not normal.
No. I am having a moment of Total Recognition. I am connected to this photograph! I know this person! Even though I’ve never met him! If the gods of love could whisper in my ear, this is what they would be saying:
You have just laid eyes on a man who is going to trigger every single childhood wound you have, who is going to bring those wounds to the surface, and who will, in the process, bring you to your knees, all for the purpose of your healing.
Like I said, love at first sight.
Quickly, I scan his profile—as if what I read will even matter. It is exceptionally well written. In it, he talks about living downtown in a loft, and all I can think is I wonder how I’m going to like living downtown.
Even as I’m thinking these thoughts, I’m aware that they are quote-unquote insane. I’ve never even met this guy! But obviously I’m not crazy. Crazy people don’t know when they’re thinking crazy thoughts. I know this is crazy. Totally different.
I call out to Lisa, who is busy writing something profound, like “(PAUL) Good evening, I’m Paul Magers. (LAURA) And I’m Laura Diaz. Our top story tonight…”
“Now here’s the kind of guy I like,” I say.
“Show me,” she says. “What kind of guy do you like?”
I swivel the computer screen in her direction. “This kind.” She looks at the picture of Paul. She wrinkles her nose.
“He looks like Beck,” she says.
“I know. Isn’t he awesome?”
“Whatever gets you off,” she says. “Just invite me to the wedding.”
I click the page closed and go back to my stupid newswriting. But for the next half hour, I can’t seem to stop myself from thinking about how much I’m going to like living downtown…
I ONLY REMEMBER A COUPLE OF THEM. Of the dozen or so foster homes June says I bounced through before landing in their lovely four-bedroom contemporary (the nicest house on the block), memories of all but a few have faded.
Actually, “remember” is not quite the right word.
What I have are impressions. Some of them are visual—pictures of scenes, of rooms, of people’s faces where the centers are blurry like if you had glaucoma. Others are aural, like the house near the train tracks where the man came into my room at night, or olfactory, like the place that smells of Charlie perfume and unchanged diapers. Whichever sense the images are connected to, they are not so much clear as they are indelible and unchanging over time. That’s how I know they’re real.
I have memories going back to age three, which isn’t really amazing when you consider how much was going on. My personal theory is that when people don’t remember their childhoods, it’s because not much was happening that a kid would consider newsworthy. When things are crack-a-lackin’—Mom’s a-leavin’, and Dad’s a-gettin’ jailed—you remember plenty.
The first place I remember is my grandma McMillan’s in Gary, Indiana. But it’s not her house I remember so much as the restaurant where she worked. Thelma was a short-order cook at a coffee shop around the corner. While she fried eggs and bacon and sausages and hash browns and served them to the neighborhood people, my cousins Russell and Ray and I used to jump on a pile of old mattresses in a back room. A scene that sounds (and was) superghetto but that I remember as being superfun.
I stayed at Thelma’s only a couple of months. The story of exactly how I came to leave there would make a great first episode in a TV series I should pitch about a detective who traces the lives of kids from broken families back to the source of their original dysfunction. In the show, a couple of smart detectives (one of them me) would run around putting together all the pieces of how someone’s life (okay, mine) got so fucked-up.
My real-life investigation starts with a phone call to Phyllis, the longtime girlfriend of one of my dad’s posse members, who still lives in South Minneapolis. I get her number from Cadillac, who is still my dad’s best friend on the outside. Cadillac lives in Los Angeles, and though I don’t see him often, we speak regularly on the phone. He became an actor in his fifties and now has a cool career playing character parts in movies and television. He’s the only posse member who never did time. He’s like a godfather to me.
“You call her,” he says of Phyllis. “She knew your mom. And she likes to talk.”
He’s so right. As part of the inner circle, Phyllis was good friends with Linda, which means she had a front-row—or should I say ringside—seat to my early-life drama. When she picks up the phone, it’s like we’ve known each other forever.
“Girl, I knowed you since before you was born.” Phyllis’s got a tenor sax for a voice—bright and reedy and impossible to ignore. “I sure did. I knew your mama and your dad’s girlfriend Yvonne, too. I loved Linda. Mmm-hmm.”
Phyllis says “mmm-hmmm” the way teenage girls say the word “like.” Like, constantly.
Mmmm-hmmm.
There’s a thing in writing TV cop shows—it’s the first thing you learn—where the detectives go looking for A, but they always find B. It’s how you keep the story surprising. It’s also what happens, apparently, in real life.
Before talking to Phyllis, I thought I knew all about My Life, the Early Years. I’ve had countless conversations with Cadillac—about pimping, hustling, my dad, my mom, and Minneapolis in the 1960s. But talking to Phyllis is different—she’s a chick, so she has all the chick-type information. Like what folks were wearing.
“Linda was sharp, girl,” Phyllis enthuses. “Mmm-hmm. She was sharp. She had herself a mink coat. You know they had the coats made out of the females and the coats made out of the males? She had the really expensive one.” Actually, I didn’t know this. Learn something new every day. “I used to call her Miss Jackie Kennedy, ’cause she look just like Jackie.”
Well, maybe not quite just like Jackie. I’ve seen pictures from this era, and indeed, Linda had a bouffant (on a good day—on a bad day a bouffant is just a rat’s nest), and a couple of cute Oleg Cassini knockoffs. With her big orangey-hazel-brown eyes and wide smile, Linda definitely had her something. And charisma to match my dad’s. But she was a good couple hundred miles, at least, away from Miss Porter’s.
After some more reminiscing about female minks and sixties hairdos, Phyllis gives me the twist. “You know Linda’s mother ruined her life, girl,” she says casually. “Mmmm-hmmm.”
No, I didn’t know this.
“She shore did.”
“Do you mean Helen?” I prod.
“Yeah, I mean Helen. Linda’s mother. That woman, she took it to the limit. The limit, girl.”
“The limit?” (I make a mental note to resurrect the use of the phrase “the limit” by overusing it until it catches on. Kind of like “right on” circa 1997.) “What did she do?”
“Mmmm-hmmm. She got all dressed up and visit Freddie in the prison and tell him she gon’ take you home with her. And she went
down to Gary and got you from your grandmama—”
Oh, yeah. Now I remember. One of my indelible images is a plane ride I took home from Gary. I remember the plane. I just never knew who was sitting next to me.
“And when she got you back to Minneapolis, girl…” Phyllis pauses. I can feel her shaking her head on the other end of the line, and all at once, I know this is the moment—the big reveal—where the final fact drops and the villain is unmasked.
“She put you in a foster home.” Phyllis’s voice is clogged with disgust. “And didn’t nobody know where you was. Mmmm-hmmm.” She lets it sink in, good and long. “She took it to the limit.”
So this is why my dad’s family didn’t take me? I always thought it was because my dad didn’t want me to be raised in Gary—that it was too poor and too dangerous for his taste, a conclusion I came to knowing that my aunt Florence and cousin Rochelle were murdered the year after I left.
But if Phyllis was right, and she sounded mighty right, it was my own grandmother who gave me away. Not only did she not want me, she didn’t want anyone else to have me, either.
Why? Or, more accurately, why not?
Phyllis must be able to read my thoughts, because she’s already explaining it to me. “See, you was the bond between your mom and dad. Your grandmama didn’t want them to have nothin’ to do with each other. Some womens would do anything not to have they daughter mixed up with no black man. Prostitutin’ and stuff.
“Helen hated your dad. She thought if she got ridda you, they wouldn’t have no reason to be together. Mmm-hmmm. But didn’t matter where they put you, your daddy always tracked you down. I never seen a man so crazy about his child.” I’m still trying to process all this, but Phyllis’s on a roll.
“Linda had no life when her mother got done with her. She don’t dress no more. Her feet was dirty under the bottom. You know what I’m sayin’?” Her voice rises at the end of the sentence for punctuation.
Yeah. Not really. But, yeah, I guess so.
“She didn’t care about her life no more. Her mother tore her life up.”
I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Page 4
