The headless housewife, I imagined, flapping her arms like a chicken.
When I finally poked through the collar, my hair stood on end with electrostatic. Then I scrunched the sleeves past my wrists, and tried twirling in a circle like a dervish. But the gown was too long, so I had to stop.
"You’re crazy,” I told myself, grabbing the radio. "You’re insane.”
"That’s right, looks like any chance we had for rain has all but disappeared,” a throaty-sounding DJ said, speaking over the fade-out of a song. "Well now, instead of thunderclaps here’s Mr. John Lee Hooker -- as requested by Jimmy in Salado-going boom boom boom for everyone on the Stillhouse Hollow Lake marina."
Ah-boom boom boom, I wanna shoot ya right down!
With John Lee Hooker vibrating in my hand, I headed downstairs. The gown dragged at my feet, and it was a precarious trip from one squeaky step to the next. Still, I managed without trouble, envisioning myself as a graceful ghost while descending into the murky dining room. At the bottom of the stairs, the gown hem swept across the floorboards, stirring dust in my wake. But it didn’t matter much. Everything was dusty anyway -- the long dining room table, the oak sideboard, the air I inhaled.
"Aaaa-choo!” I faked a sneeze, hoping to summon my father’s attention.
To the right of the stairs was the kitchen, and to the left was the dining room and then the living room, separated by only a wood-burning stove. Because the entire downstairs lacked interior walls, it was fairly easy to gaze from room-to-room -- especially when standing at the foot of the stairs.
"Aaaa-choo!" I went again, but my father remained as before in the living room, so I about-faced and glided into the kitchen.
Leaving the radio near the stove, I dug in the grocery sack and placed the goods on the counter. Then I turned ravenous.
A saltine dabbed into the peanut butter jar, breaking the glossy surface.
More saltines followed.
John Lee Hooker had long since finished, and now bluegrass music entertained the kitchen. Wild fiddles and stomping feet kept time with my smacking.
I drank from a gallon jug, spilling water on the gown.
Then my index finger became a knife, squishing peanut butter across a slice of Wonder Bread. And I continued eating and drinking, waiting for my stomach to feel satisfied.
By the time I was full, my eyes had grown tired. There was peanut butter on the roof of my mouth, along the ridges of my gums, and I was content, half-awake and nourished, listening to "K-V-R-P, eclectic music for eclectic minds-”
Fatigue pushed me downward.
With the gown bunched over me like a blanket, I was aware for the first time how very warm What Rocks was -- as if the entire place was holding a stifled breath. But the floor seemed cooler than anywhere else in the house. And the radio was now playing Tumbleweed, one of my father’s slower songs, so it was okay to rest for a little while.
In the ethereal moments before sleep, I imagined my father on a stage in some L.A. dive, where a beam of indigo light shone on him, glistening in the creases of his black leather pants and jacket. With his legs apart, his guitar held in front of him like a weapon, he curled his top lip, saying, "This is for the loves of my life, my baby girl and my beautiful wife.”
An Elvis moment, he called it. Every performance needs one.
Tumbleweed, tumbleweed blowin 'cross the yard
Wonder where you’re goin', wonder how far
Tumbleweed, tumbleweed rollin’ in my mind
Wonder what she's doin’, wonder who she’ll find
My mother bragged that the lyrics were written about her, and I never heard my father say otherwise. He wrote them while touring England during the early ‘70s. That’s where they met. My mother, a runaway from Brooklyn, was a wafer-thin eighteen-year-old, who had an Asian guru named Sanjuro. She also had The Who, or, to be exact, the drummer, Keith Moon. By then, my father was a guitar-twang icon, known for his string of instrumental hits in the 50’s, and an emotive, ferocious style of playing that had influenced a young Pete Townshend. Evidently though, when Pete saw my father perform in London, he was quite disappointed. lt was an acoustic performance of country standards, mostly Hank Williams and johnny Cash covers. Following the show, Pete went backstage long enough to shake my father’s hand, then he sulked away by himself.
"I’m sure he made a song about that night,” my father once remarked, digressing from how my mother was introduced to him. "‘The Punk Meets The Godfather’- I’m positive that one’s about me. Not a nice tribute."
But Moon the Loon was delighted.
"I won’t say I don’t like country," he exclaimed, "because I do!"
He had arrived in my father’s dressing room disguised as an orthodox Jew, reeking of brandy and hyperbole.
"Musical innovation, a step forward backwards," he cheered maniacally. "Just like Mozart, except different! A
Gordian Knot in a shoelace!”
And as a gift, he ushered forth my mother -- "an insane bint for your pleasure and gratuity” -- who waltzed into the dressing room costumed as Pippi Longstocking. She looked tomboyish, tall and slender, with the cheeks of her face freckled and her blue eyes shining.
"Don’t know if it was love at first sight,” my father had said on the Greyhound, "but pretty darn close, I think. And it was good to begin with, and it stayed good for a long time because she made me feel like a kid-and I still had some money then. And she knew where to get diamorphine cheap, so I saved some dough because by the time we met I’d been buying expensive Chinese heroin. But she could get me brown and medical heroin for much less than what I’d been paying for the Number 4 type. Your mother was connected, Jeliza-Rose. Even when we moved to LA, she knew who to call and where to go. And before she got lazy and fat she could cook us up a storm. She made burritos and pizza and all kinds of greasy nice stuff. I miss that about her. I wish you’d known her then. She really was a treat.”
But he might as well have been talking about someone else. My mother slept all day and ate Crunch bars for dinner and talked to herself until dawn. And she wasn’t a treat.
I can’t say when it was exactly that I began to hate her, but I suppose it started after I turned nine. By that point, my parents were full-time junkies. My father was incapable of touring, and he had grown emaciated and weak. My mother, on the other hand, had ballooned in weight -- so much so that on the rare occasions when she managed to climb from bed, the springs creaked as if groaning relief, and the mattress continued to sag with the impression of her body.
At nine, I was given two chores -- massaging my mother’s legs, sanitizing and preparing the syringe. And while I became conscientious at both, there was only enjoyment to be had in making sure the needle was ready. Because my father believed public education bred dumb children, I was schooled at home, which amounted to little more than stolen library books (literary classics picked by my father, way beyond my reading ability), and afternoons of PBS.
Soon as I awoke in the mornings, my first class began in the kitchen -- where concentrated bleach was drawn into the syringe from a coffee cup, then squirted away in the sink. After the process was repeated, I flushed the syringe and needle through with cold water. Next, I scooped some junk from its hiding place in a sugar tin, dissolving the brown dust in a teaspoon with hot water and vitamin C powder. Then using a dining table chair for a perch, I stood at the gas stove, holding the spoon over a burner, feeling the stainless steel warm as the flame helped bubble clean the remaining particles.
Once the solution was safely sucked up into the syringe, I carried my homework to the living room. My father would either be sitting on the floor with his guitar or stretched across the couch gazing blankly at the television.
Sometimes he’d say, "Good morning,” while taking the syringe from my hand. But usually he said nothing.
He just targeted the large vein running the length of his inner arm, injecting himself, then -- in the brief moments before the rush seized him -- brou
ght the remaining amount to my mother in their bedroom.
After the morning ritual, I was pretty much done until evening. My recess lasted hours. I was free to watch TV, and -- by organizing the dining table chairs, collecting the dirty clothes and sheets strewn around the apartment -- I erected an elaborate tent home in the living room. There I ate quiet meals in the company of my Barbie heads.
For breakfast it was two Eskimo Pies from the freezer. For lunch I alternated between Pop Tarts and Nutter Butters. Dinner consisted of Dr. Pepper, a Milky Way, cinnamon toast.
But, if all the Milky Ways were gone, I’d substitute one of my mother’s Crunch bars, which were supposed to be off limits. And even though she spent weeks in the bedroom, somehow she sensed when I’d been at her candy; while rubbing her feet at night, I always paid for the transgression by receiving an abrupt kick on the chin.
"What have I told you before?” she’d say again and again. "You miserable creep, you never learn! I can’t teach you anything about what’s mine!”
But I had learned something: heroin gave my father neutrality, serving as an antidote for a mind too difficult to manage. For my mother, having lived a short life lacking much meaning at all, heroin offered nothing. The drug had run away with her as a teenager, and the experience was ultimately a mediocre one. Her warm, dreamy, carefree bubble had become a void. So, when going to her bedside, I knew who the real miserable creep was. And I knew she would eventually kick out, or throw the wet rag she used to wipe the sweat from her puffy face. Still, she never struck hard enough to make me cry. Mostly, she just ranted. Sometimes making sense, often not.
While massaging the fatness of her pale legs, pushing my fingertips along the lumpy skin, my mother’s mouth seemed to function independently of her brain. "Lip-smacking junkie baby,” she called me, and I understood a verbal barrage was about to follow. It seemed scripted, differing slightly with each performance: "Withdrawal is what I went through -- that way you wouldn’t get born hooked. Irritable and hyperactive baby too, nothing but a high-pitched cry and twitching and spasms and convulsions. Your daddy blew smoke in your mouth to keep you quiet, you know that? Think you got damaged by that, but don’t blame me. Because I breast-fed you forever -- and they’re all wrong, dear, because drugs don’t mess with breast milk in a major way. It’s your daddy’s fault you’re like you are. Not mine. I loved you.”
Taking a labored breath, she dabbed the rag to her forehead and then propped up on her elbows, the bedsprings squeaking as she did. Her voice suddenly changed, becoming softer.
"Jeliza-Rose, do you know I love you? Honey, I’m sorry. If you'd just fix me a hit and something to eat, I'll do something nice for you soon. I promise, baby.”
I always played my part too, nodding, fully aware of the lie -- she would never do anything nice for me soon. But leaving her bedside, I’d manage a smile anyway, tormented by the thought of ever entering that bedroom again, or of touching her swollen calves.
So on the afternoon she turned blue and died of respiratory failure, I skipped around the living room whistling the theme from Sesame Street, the happiest song in the world.
"The methadone killed her,” my father said, looking haggard and confused on the couch. "I should’ve kept her on junk -- just cut her daily dose and kept her on it.”
Junky logic: with the hope of finally getting clean, he had traded the Buick for pills -- though he understood that methadone was more addictive, more dangerous, and more deadly than heroin.
Bringing his hands to his face, he said, "Now she's dead, and I don’t have a car.”
A week earlier, he and my mother had decided to quit mainlining. The tough decision came after our apartment was robbed late one night. I remember waking to the sounds of the front door splintering and breaking open, my father shouting, "Get the fuck out of here! I said I’d get the dough Thursday! Talk to Leo, that’s what I told him!” There were other voices, men with calm and threatening tones, saying, "Listen, Noah, we’ve been through this,” and, "No more screwing around, all right?"
But in my bed, I pretended it was all a spooky dream.
When I stirred the next morning, I found my father in the kitchen. He was pouring the contents of the sugar tin into the sink. His hands were shaking, and his teeth chattered, even as he said, "Howdy, sweetheart."
The microwave was missing. So was the toaster.
In the living room, the TV and VCR and stereo were gone.
"Bog men paid us visit,” he told me. "But now we’re okay. I’ve talked with your mother. It’s all good. You’ll see.”
And I started crying -- not because I was glad or relieved, but because the very idea of bog men dragging themselves into the apartment filled me with horror.
My father set the tin aside. "Oh, no,” he said, "everything’s fine." Then he tried lifting me, but couldn’t gather the strength. So he hugged me instead, patting my neck, saying, "See, when was the last time Daddy did this? It’s getting better already.” I felt his fingers trembling, the sweat on his palms. "Not a thing to worry about, my little girl." And I almost believed him.
But on the day my mother’s corpse rested in their bedroom, it was my turn to be the comforter. Her overdose had taken about twelve hours to run its course. What began as irregular breathing, concluded with blue skin and pupils reduced to a pinpoint, but all the while my father expected her to pull through. In a last effort to revive her, he poured cold water on her face, but it didn’t help.
"Please don’t be sad," I told him in the living room, putting my head against his shoulder. "We can go to Jutland if you want.”
For a moment he grinned. "Wouldn’t that be wonderful.”
"Yes," I said, "and we can eat her Crunch bars too.”
Then he held me close, saying, "No one’s taking you from me. That’s not happening here. We’re leaving, okay?”
"Okay.”
While I quickly packed, my father swaddled my mother from head to toe in the bedding. Then he called me to join him in their bedroom.
"If she was a Viking ship,” he announced, "we’d have to bury her with horses and food and gold plates.”
He wore his backpack and seemed anxious to get going. I stood beside him with my suitcase, staring at the shrouded corpse. Even in death, her body odor was potent. "Anything you want to say?”
I shrugged. "I don’t know. She’s like a mummy.”
He sighed.
"Well, I’ve pretty much said what I wanted when she was alive, so no point wasting time.”
He dug his Bic lighter from a pocket, clicked on the flame, and attempted to ignite the mattress. But it wouldn’t catch, so eventually he gave up, saying, "Bad idea anyways. It might burn the whole building and everyone else."
And as we hurried from the bedroom, I paused to take a final glance at my mother, imagining her congested breathing while dying. Her pulmonary arteries had become clogged with blood, forcing the fluid through the capillaries and into the lungs. In the violent throes near the end, she kicked her chubby legs wildly, shaking the bedsprings to the limit.
"Come on,” my father said. He was waiting at the end of the hallway. "Don’t stare, it’s bad luck.”
"Mom’s dead all right,” I said, turning to face him.
Gripping my suitcase, I thought, Poor Queen Gunhild -- drowning in a bog like that.
5
It was still night when the mystery train appeared. The whistle entered my dreams, manifesting itself as a doorbell buzzing.
Waking on the kitchen floor, I listened while the freight cars flurried alongside Grandmother’s property, picturing the school bus shaking in the pasture. Soon the whistle grew fainter until the only sound came from the portable radio, a female DJ reading the news: "A mixed message from the White House, conflicting with earlier statements-”
Mitch Cullin Page 3
