The first time I took one of my mother’s pills I was ten years old. I had a headache and we didn’t have any aspirin. We never had any practical stuff like that in our house. I doubt we had Band-Aids or Q-tips that day, either. But we were well stocked with Percocet and Vicodin and Ativan. Whenever I went to a friend’s house and complained of a headache, I would look at the aspirin I was given with confusion. “Is this really all you have?” I felt like saying. I assumed that other people’s mothers were just stingy.
Then came a new pill, OxyContin. My mother had lots of pet names for her pills. I wish I could remember all of them—Oscar de la Rentas, Oscar De La Hoyas, and, in honor of the Academy Awards, plain old Oscars. It was a prescription painkiller new to the market in the 1990s. On the off chance that you haven’t heard of it, here is a little analogy:
OXYCONTIN : HEROIN :: MARGARINE : BUTTER
These two drugs follow the same pathway through the human body, producing the same chain of reactions from bloodstream to brain, except that one is derived from natural opiates harvested in an Afghan poppy field and the other is synthetically engineered by the Purdue Pharma corporation. My mother had a rotation of specialists whom she consulted for her various ailments, and all of these doctors were men who doled out OxyContin as though the pharmaceutical companies were giving complimentary blow jobs for every new prescription they wrote. In 2001, OxyContin was the highest legally sold drug of its kind. And it was all over the street. Kathi was one of the first people in our area to get a prescription.
I’ll never forget the day she broke a twenty-milligram Oscar in half, giving me one piece to swallow as she snorted the other half in solidarity. I don’t remember why she did this. I might have complained about a headache. Maybe I was crying over a fight I’d had with one of my toxic, ephemeral best friends. Mum never distinguished between physical and emotional pain, especially when she had a pill that could cure both.
Imagine a hundred-pound teenager on the equivalent of one bump of heroin. The moment the pill kicked in, there was a warmth in my stomach that spread to my arms and legs. I could feel my heart pulsing in my hands, and every beat seemed to pump a new surge of contentment and hope into my veins. I floated from my bedroom down the hall to the bathroom, where I knelt on the filthy tiled floor and vomited a day’s worth of food in less than thirty seconds. Puking violently, I swear I have never felt so good in my entire life. I had an overwhelming urge to tell my mother how much I loved her, but there I was, hugging the toilet bowl for Act 2 of my own private opera.
When I was finally through, I rinsed my mouth and climbed up onto Kathi’s bed.
“Mum,” I said as I lay down beside her, “you are my best friend in the whole world.”
“I know I am, Honey.” She raked her long fingernails through my hair, something she hadn’t done since I was a little girl. “I always will be.”
Mang
———
MY MOTHER ONCE HAD A DRUG DEALER WHO FELL MADLY IN love with her. His name was Oliver. He had a football player’s build, shaved his head to the bone every morning, lived in the city of Lynn, a notoriously crime-ridden satellite of Boston, and was briefly a member of the Nation of Islam.
Or, as Mum put it in her first descriptive sentence of him, “Ol’s black!”
Oliver lent Kathi a stack of his favorite CDs, which she listened to like an obsessive teenager. “Ol likes that rap music,” she told me. “It’s not usually my thing, but have you heard of the rapper Notorious B.I.G.? He’s really good. He reminds me of me.”
I had just finished my first semester of college, where Biggie’s album Life After Death was a staple in my dorm. It was late December of 1997. I scribbled the answers to my last final exam as fast as I could and caught a direct flight back to Boston. My heart had been pounding the whole day with the fearful, euphoric rhythm that always carried me home. After landing, I waited for about three hours at Logan Airport for my mother to pick me up, then got on a pay phone to call her collect.
“Where are you?”
“Where are you?”
She had completely forgotten that I was coming home that day. “I’m on my way right now, Honey. Oooh, I have so many surprises for you! Just you wait!”
One of them was the white Lincoln Navigator SUV she arrived in. It was a luxury war chariot that got about twelve miles to the gallon, the vehicle of choice for multiplatinum-selling pop stars that year. Mum didn’t know any of this when she started leasing hers. She just picked out the biggest thing on the lot.
“Sometimes, when I’m stuck in traffic, I fantasize about driving right over the other cars,” Mum told me. “I could really do it, you know. Did you see the size of those tires?”
Looking out the window, I realized how high we were elevated. “It feels like wearing platform shoes,” I said.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” Mum cried, then reached across my lap to open the glove box. She pulled out a tiny stainless-steel revolver with mother-of-pearl inlay on the handle. “Look! It’s white to match the ’Gator. Do you want one for Christmas?”
Her new friend Oliver had connections, she said. He promised to hook her up with another pistol for next to nothing. I politely declined.
“Are you crazy?” My mother waved her little gun in the air. “At that price, it would be a waste not to buy another one. Come on. We can take a class together so it’ll be totally safe and legal. Get certified and everything.”
I handled the gun with my scarf and returned it to the glove box. “Didn’t you just say this gun was stolen?”
“Jesus, Nikki. Do you ever get exhausted being you?”
With the gun now out of sight, I relaxed and stretched my legs. Fiddling with the dials on the seat, I found that there was enough room for me to kick my feet in the air without grazing the dashboard. There was also a seat warmer. I helped myself to one of my mother’s cigarettes and reclined way, way back. The Navigator made me very nervous (too big, too white, too expensive—I didn’t see this ending well), but I had to admit it was a comfortable ride, and hard-core rap sounded so good booming through its speakers.
The sky that day was a soiled white sheet sagging with the threat of snow. We rounded a corner. Bright flashes of silver shivered then vanished through gaps in the trees. The ocean. I was home.
When we got to Eden Glen Avenue, Mum transferred Oliver’s CD to the stereo. She’d recently bought a new sound system outfitted with eight small, state-of-the-art speakers that she piled up on the cardboard boxes they came in. This whole setup was worth more than every other electronic appliance in our house combined; it was probably more expensive than the negligible slice of tuition my college scholarship didn’t cover, which my mother was reliably delinquent in paying. That stereo had a lot of weight to pull in a house that was otherwise in shambles. New floors, roof, plumbing, and heating were long overdue when we had moved in six years earlier. Now there were holes in the floor that glimmered light from the kitchen above when I did laundry in the cellar. It was no longer safe to drink water from the tap, and there was an infestation of both rats and squirrels that I could hear fighting inside the walls at night.
The most significant change during the past few months that I’d been away at college was the crack pipe on the coffee table. There had always been paraphernalia hidden around the house while I was growing up. Items would turn up from time to time like a sloppy Easter-egg hunt. Searching for a lost TV remote, I would open a curtain or lift a towel off a cardboard box and find a burned spoon and the cap of a disposable syringe. Now, it seemed, my parents were leaving it all out in the open as casually as they would a pair of dirty socks.
Kathi skipped ahead to her favorite track on Oliver’s CD, “The Ten Crack Commandments.” It’s a violent, nihilistic yet danceable how-to guide for dealing crack cocaine. My mother knew every word by heart:
“Keep your fam’ly and business / completely separated / Money and blood don’t mix / Like two dicks and one bitch / You find yourself in serious sh
it.…”
She turned up the volume as loud as it would go, then went outside to the porch and shot her two middle fingers at our neighbors’ house. Her knees bobbed in a funny, fat-white-lady dance. I knew that I had grown up a great deal when I saw her do this, because for the first time I was not embarrassed by but for her.
I turned down the stereo. Mum came back inside and lit a cigarette. “I just love it when Ol comes and picks me up. The neighbors look at us in horror. I told him, ‘Play your music loud enough to give all these fucks aneurysms, Ol!’ He thinks I’m a riot.”
It had been a long time since I’d seen my mother this happy. She started chopping garlic for a sauce that would eventually burn, so rapt was she in her quixotic tale of interracial love.
OLIVER WAS A SUCCESSFUL drug dealer on the North Shore and my mother was one of his best clients. He would drive up from Lynn to make his deliveries to her and afterward he and my mother would go for a ride. “He has the same Lincoln I do, same year and everything, only his is black!” Mum swooned. They would ride around for hours together, talking and enjoying the well-preserved scenery of Cape Ann, a tiny lobe of rock bulging just north of Boston. If they saw a nice house that was for sale, they’d stop and collect real-estate flyers. Oliver had lived in the city of Lynn all his life and he was sick of the robberies and the stabbings. He’d saved enough money over the years to move to the suburbs. My mother gave him the scoop on every single town in the area, recommending, above all, that he buy a house on the water. She had spent her entire life gazing at the same river from her kitchen window and couldn’t imagine how anyone could get along otherwise.
“He tells me over and over that he’s in love with me,” Mum said. “And I’m, like, ‘Ol, what do you want me for? I’m fat!’ He doesn’t care. Black men like big women. I mean, he wants to marry me, Nik. He said he’s never met a woman like me in his life. Oliver’s a millionaire, you know.”
The salient feature of Oliver—a man I never met but spent a lot of time praying would come into our lives—was not that he was rich but that he was sober. My mother was a natural-born junkie. She lived with a consistent, daily appetite for heroin and prescription painkillers and, on special occasions—Christmas, birthdays, the 1980s—crack and cocaine. Oliver hadn’t touched drugs or alcohol in more than fifteen years and had no intention of doing so again, except as a salesman.
One afternoon, as Oliver and Kathi were driving around Cape Ann, he hit the dashboard of his Lincoln and thanked my mother for buying it for him.
“Ol says to me, ‘Kathi, this new house I’m buying, it’s already half yours. You paid for it. If you won’t marry me, won’t you at least live there with me?’ ”
“Marry him, Mum. Do this for yourself. Please.”
But my mother was already married when she met Oliver. While she was out burning money for her amusement, her husband was sitting faithfully in front of one of the two televisions that were always blaring at our house, cigarette in hand, a can of beer close by. He didn’t worry about his wife driving around with another man, and he didn’t need to; Kathi’s marriage vows were a promise that she actually kept.
ONE SPRING MORNING IN 1986, a few days after I’d gone to the hospital to have a ring on my finger removed, I discovered the man who had driven us to the hospital sleeping next to my mother in her water bed. The skin on his back was pitted with acne scars and the breath wafting from his open mouth stank of beer. It was a weekday morning, time for me to go to school, and I knew from experience that I had a better chance of waking up this stranger than of rousing my mother. Kathi slept like the dead. I could shake and shake her but she wouldn’t budge until I’d pressed ice cubes or a cold jug of milk against her leg. Even if I succeeded in waking her, there was no guarantee that she would then get up and drive me to school. And every time a “tardy” showed up on my report card another tiny ulcer seared the lining of my stomach.
“Hey.” I shook the sleeping man’s shoulder. His snores stopped and he looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “Hey. Can you give me a ride?”
He got up, pulled on his pants, and lit a cigarette. The car he drove was a blue Chevy Nova with one brown door. On the ride to school, Michael leaned his body toward the open window as though he might curl up and take a nap there. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other drumming out the beat of a tune from the radio on his knee. When we got to St. Mary’s, I hopped out of the car. Michael leaned out the window and called out, “Smell ya later!”
My mother dated this cabbie for about two weeks before he packed all his clothes into the back of his car and moved in with us. Four years later—on my tenth birthday—they got married.
MY MOTHER HAD CATASTROPHIC taste in men. She tried to blame this on me. “You were such a guy magnet, Nikki. They always fell in love with you first.”
One of her suitors was a drug dealer named Richie. His claim to fame was that he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew George Jung, the man whose life story would one day become a movie called Blow, starring Johnny Depp. Richie had grand plans for my mother to smuggle cocaine for him in my diapers.
“He told me to meet him in Florida,” Mum recalled years later. “He even bought you and me round-trip tickets. But I was too afraid.” She made a fist with her hand and bit it anxiously. “Oh, sometimes when I think of the money we could have made, I just want to cry!”
I was too young to remember Richie. All the other boyfriends have fused into an amalgam named Raúl, a congenital scumbag who bought my mother a lot of gold necklaces, then ripped them off her neck one afternoon when they were fighting and tried to flush them down the toilet. I don’t remember how old I was then, only that I openly despised Raúl and he and my mother tolerated this just fine. The morning after one of their all-night coke binges, I found a can of soda on the bathroom counter and took a swig. Flat, syrupy cigarette ashes went down my throat and quickly came back up. It was a point of pride for me as a kid that I could vomit all by myself, no assistance necessary. (My mother cried like a baby and made me rub her back whenever she puked.) I cleaned myself and the bathroom, then gleefully told my mother what had happened. I was fishing for a sympathetic yelp, maybe even a conciliatory Happy Meal.
“Fuckin’ Raúl,” Kathi said. But anyone could have left the can in there. It could easily have been her.
MIKE THE GREEK WAS how Kathi introduced the cabdriver to our family. He grew up in Danvers, in an apartment just across the river from my mother. His father owned a taxi company whose office and garage were next door to his home. Michael started sweeping the garage when he was eleven years old and learned auto mechanics in high school. His father treated him worse than any of the other employees, scheduling him around the clock and paying him less. It was in this garage and in the dark, wood-paneled dispatcher’s office upstairs, papered with decades of crinkled porn and ripped-out comics, that Michael smoked his first cigarette and drank his first beer, probably alone.
“He grew up in a dungeon,” my mother said. She felt sorrier for Michael than for anyone else in the world, including herself.
FROM THE GET-GO MIKE the Greek seemed different from my mother’s other boyfriends. He was clownish and mellow when he was sober, quiet but quick to laugh when he was drunk. He loved Led Zeppelin loud and Neil Young electric. He loved the crude, stuttering freaks on The Howard Stern Show. He always had a working car, and he sang along to the radio with passion. By the time he took up a permanent post in my mother’s water bed, I had already decided to like him.
Michael and Kathi would get high and smoke cigarettes all night in our living room. They were so happy and in love that my mother would let me stay up as late as I wanted with them. She made me my favorite mocktail—Coca-Cola on the rocks with a dash of milk. I made up funny stories to entertain them while they took turns cutting and blowing lines off our coffee table, an old wooden lobster trap with a plate of glass on top. We rented Brian De Palma’s Scarface so many weekends in a row that the video-store owner let us keep it.
Michael did an amazing impression of Pacino’s Tony Montana. For a spell, he had an almost autistic tendency to talk with a Cuban accent, so much so that my mother and I started calling him Mang. When I had to leave a note for him, I would address it like this:
Mang,
I need a ride to dance class tomorrow at 3:15!
Ju got a proling with that?
Love, Nikki
My mother drove a taxi for Michael’s father for almost six weeks before she quit. “I swear to Christ, I’ll never work for another Greek as long as I live,” she said. By then her goal had been achieved—a live-in boyfriend who helped her pay bills and didn’t mind chauffeuring her daughter around town. She used the opportunity to go back to school and get her manicurist license.
As Michael’s father grew older and increasingly alcoholic (the elder Greek died painfully of liver cancer in his early sixties), my stepdad became the reluctant boss of the C&A Taxi Company. It was the inheritance of a migraine. The company consisted of a small fleet of broken-down cabs serving a suburban community where nearly everyone with a driver’s license owned a car. The mainstay of the taxi business was a few elderly women who could no longer make it to the supermarket and back on their own and who tipped ten cents on a five-dollar fare.
It was clear that Michael was going to run his father’s business into the ground, so Kathi started hanging around the office to see if she could help. Only two of the nine cabs were running, and the accountant, a wizened old man who was himself dying of lung cancer, recommended Chapter 11. With no education, business, or even managerial experience whatsoever, my mother transformed C&A Taxi into Kathi, Inc., a coach and livery company specializing in the transport of special-needs children. She secured five- and six-figure contracts with every school district on the North Shore. She was on a first-name basis with several superintendents and town selectmen. At Christmas, our run-down little house would be filled with gourmet fruit baskets from various school committees and PTAs. Within a few short years, my mother’s new company was grossing a million dollars a year.
With or Without You: A Memoir Page 12
