by Mary Karr
And there I sit, poised as if on a flagpole, feeling with my free hand for my drink, when the wisp of an idea trails through my head. It doesn’t last, but it’s audible: you’re the bad mom in the afterschool special, the example other moms—little parentheses drawn down around their glossy mouths—go to the principal about.
Oh, horseshit, I think. Mother fell down and pissed her pants, Daddy got in fistfights and drank himself to death. (Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) I turned out half okay; well, a quarter—at least a tenth okay.
As a new mother, I used to cup my son’s downy head with wild tenderness and marvel at his heavy slump in my arms, and for the few moments his china-blue eyes fixed on mine before they closed, it was as if the sky had been boiled down and rendered into that small gaze. Those first months, I fed him from myself. And doing so felt like the first true and good act I’d managed in my whole slipshod life.
Then I started drinking every day and stopped breastfeeding, and tonight, while holding the bottle to his working mouth, I averted my eyes for fear he’d see the gutshot animal I’m morphing into, which mirrors the mother I fled to keep from becoming, the one who shoved me off—Don’t hug me, you’re making me hot her tagline.
Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an expectant grin, I’ll shoo him away. Sex of the calf-roping variety still takes place, but otherwise, I’d felt so alone with my son that first year when night after sleepless night I’d gotten up while the husband slept like a hog in his wallow with a white-noise machine to mask the loud misery I gave off—now we connect at no point.
Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out—first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor—I’d go out to the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.
The garage faces me like an empty pit, and I sit on the house’s threshold facing it till the edges of the square hole go blurry. If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak. Instead, I stare at my finger with dwindling success, for behind it, the view is getting wavery, and in an attempt to adjust, to regain my bearings, I tip my face up slightly into summer rain, which move makes the world take an unprecedented lurch. My head pitches back like a Pez dispenser. The postage-stamp backyard whips from view.
I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time—Problem Six?—the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.
PART I
Escape from the Tropic of Squalor
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that’s how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
literature.
—William Matthews, “Mingus at the Showplace”
They all followed a circuitous route, which very often took them to foreign countries, but led only to disintegration and death, and meanwhile their parents, their brothers and sisters and other relatives, drank themselves to death at home…. They existed in a ceaseless delirium of accusation and blame, which amounted to a deadly disease.
—Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence
1
Lost in the Golden State
Here lies one whose name was writ in water
—gravestone of John Keats
Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific Ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.
No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.
Easy and Quinn were unhooking their boards from the truck that had choked and sputtered through twelve hundred uncertain miles.
Wasn’t that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted Robert Frost:
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
And thought of doing something to the shore
Water had never done to land before…
Pretty, Doonie said.
Quinn spat in the sand and said, She’s always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she’s fine.
He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.
My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.
That’s me, I said. Miss California.
Quinn himself was no Adonis. We called him Quinn the Eskimo, since he’d just moved to Leechfield from the Alaskan oil fields where his daddy had worked. Blond as Jean Harlow, pimply, he was also skinny enough to crash a junior high dance. His sole source of pride was the obvious lie that his old man had invented the water bed, then tragically had his patent pinched by some California engineer. From the time we’d hit the state line, he’d been going into phone booths to skim directories for the guy’s name.
Doonie tucked his board under his arm, saying, Y’all little bitches stand here and fight it out. I’m gonna carve those waves up like your mama’s Christmas turkey.
Then they were running down the immaculate white sand with their boards—Doonie and Dave, Quinn and Easy and the quiet Forsythe.
But by Orange County standards, the surf sucked. I overheard the California guys bitching about it as breaking in water too shallow: Not worth wasting the wax on, dude. They stood in small bands along the beach, tanned and bleached and orthodontured. And Lord, were they fetching, those boys. I spotted no stitches on anybody, no keloid scars from boiling water. They’d suffered no car wrecks in which an ancient axle had snapped. Nobody was missing any obvious teeth, either.
In the ocean, long waves came with open-fanged mouths, drooling where the spray blew back only to bite down on my pals, who’d thrown themselves onto their homemade boards and were digging in.
From the beach, it was a bitch to witness—not just the ass-whipping the sea was delivering but the massive cheer of my friends taking it, the small and concentrated energy of repeatedly hurling themselves at impenetrable force.
Mocking their inadequacy against those waves, one guy walking past said to his small-boned girlfriend, This is why they send the white trash to Vietnam.
At some point, a guy as wasp-waisted as a Ken doll, with stomach muscles you could have bounced a quarter off, strolled over to where I sat. The sun shone through his long dark hair, making a halo around him. Maybe he’d seen our license plates, for he said to me, You Texan?
I allowed as how I was.
You interested in some acid? Ken said.
When I told him I didn’t have any money, he smirked, saying, They make chicks pay for drugs in Texas?
Which seemed to have no right answer to it, like the school bully in A Portrait of the Artist who asks Stephen Dedalus, Do you kiss your mother? Any answer seems cause for a butt-whipping.
I shrugged. What do y’all do here?
He unfo
lded a small square of surf magazine to reveal an orange tab of LSD.
I knew right off I didn’t want it, but this boy was teen-idol darling. So I set the tab atop my tongue and faked swallowing, hoping for a weak dose.
He also invited me to a graduation party a few weeks down the line in Laguna. Soon as he’d scrawled out an address and sketched a map for me, I hightailed it back to the truck to spit the tab out and wash my mouth with water from a sand-gritty milk jug.
At dusk, we parked in an apartment lot where a hometown dope dealer had left his pink Lincoln Continental with its busted steering column. Easy knew somebody who lived there, and in the way of poor hippies, they cooked us noodles and let us use their bathroom in exchange for the free pot Doonie could lay on them. Secreted inside the freakishly fat surfboard—in a scooped-out hollow in its foam core—he’d ratholed a few fragrant bricks of pot and a baggie of questionably acquired pills. These investments—tucked away from the law under sheets of fiberglass and squeegeed over with resin—would free him from the factory jobs we’ll all eventually take.
For the first time in days, inside a rank plastic shower curtain flowering with mildew, water poured over me. And it was in the shower that the acid kicked in—not full bore, just enough to keep me holding myself very still. The suds swirled down my torso like chrysanthemums in a Japanese wood-block print. And my body seemed to smoke.
By the time I’d dressed, beers were being handed around. Black speakers thumped out music. The guys agreed I could sleep in the palatial luxury of the Lincoln, not that sleep was possible on that acid. Doonie helped me run an extension cord with a caged mechanic’s light so I could read. But with the nearby ocean buzzing like a hornets’ nest, I could only puzzle over the black letters squiggling off the edges of the white page.
At some point, a looming figure glided up to the foggy side window, and I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.
But it was just Doonie’s thin shape with black frazzled hair. His knuckles whapped the glass.
I body-blocked the heavy car door open, saying, You scared the fuck out of me.
Each word materialized between my lips like a tiny pink balloon that rose with other balloons in a birdlike drove.
Doonie had his sleeping bag over his shoulder like a corpse. He said, Sorry, man. Mind if I grab the front seat?
As I stared at him, his edges grew more solid, and when I told him to go ahead, there were no more balloons blipping from my lips. He plucked an azalea off the nearby bush, saying, Can you believe how this place even smells? I didn’t know the outside could smell like this.
I breathed in the living green of it, then asked if the others were asleep.
Yeah, Doonie said, except Dave keeps busting out hollering shit. He just sat up and said, We’re all gonna die! Like he’s in Nam or something.
Doonie looked around. Man, ain’t it the Ritz up in here? Don’t you know, those side lights used to light up like the Superdome.
I looked at the long bank of dead bulbs and felt a sinking at how dim and broken everything could get.
I told him I sometimes felt like smacking Quinn for mocking me anytime I recited poetry.
Nah, it ain’t like that, Doonie said. He just associates poems with some teacher telling him he’s a dumbass.
He put his callused feet up on the dashboard behind the steering wheel. I asked him what Quinn’s momma was like.
Doesn’t have one. I don’t know.
How do you not have a mother? I said, but somehow I knew, because mine had always lived on the brink of evaporation. (Strange, we never—not one time—talked about the doped-up or drunk-assed backgrounds some of us were fleeing.)
Doonie said, Quinn’s died or ran off or something. This is according to Dave, of course, so who knows. And get this, Dave also says Quinn brought a pistol to kill the waterbed king with. If he can’t get his old man’s money back. A no-shit gunslinger pistol like we used to shoplift from Woolco. You’d get a little plastic sheriff’s badge with it. He’s got some fantasy he’s gonna get even for his daddy.
The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one. I could feel Daddy’s roots in me, but I couldn’t fit him into any version of my life I could concoct. He’d been going away for years, out into the garage at night, down into the bottle he secreted under his truck seat.
I adapted to Daddy’s absence partly by smoking enough reefer to float me through a house where—increasingly—nobody’s path intersected with another.
Doonie’s voice jolted me back into the warm car. He said, You know what I’m gonna do?
A lot of obscene and illegal stuff, I’d wager.
He said, I’m gonna fix this Lincoln up and drive it back to Leechfield. My senior year ride. No more Mama’s Torino.
Like you will, I said.
Like I won’t.
My brain was starting to melt and soften again around an old image of Daddy from childhood. How he’d come home at dawn in his denim shirt, and I’d be the only one up, peering out the back drapes till he walked across the patio. Lots of times, he’d come in and lie on his stomach on the bare boards of our yet-to-be-carpeted floor, and I’d walk barefoot along his spine. I’d have to hold on to the bookcase to keep from sliding off the sloping muscles of his back, but I’d work my toes under his scapular bones, and he’d ask, You feel my wings growing under there, Pokey? And I’d allege that I did. He claimed it always helped him get to sleep in the daylight. It was maybe the only time I felt like a contributor to the household, somehow useful in our small economy.
In the Lincoln, the image faded inside me, and I heard myself say, What use am I now?
Doonie said, Something wrong?
What the hell was wrong? Here I was, where I’d planned to be, but it felt like…like nothing. Some black and rotting cavity of wrongness still stank somewhere inside me. I could smell it but not name it.
I lay in the dark a long time and had just about forgotten Doonie was there at all when he tossed the azalea blossom over the backseat and it fell in the middle of me, as if dropped from a cloud.
Within a week or so, the party the Ken doll had invited me to rolled around. It was my only day off from the T-shirt factory where I sewed on size labels with a bunch of Mexican ladies in their sixties. Before that, we’d starved, living on what we could fetch out of grocery store dumpsters plus some raids on local orange and avocado orchards.
Walking the canyon roads that day, I couldn’t find the posh Laguna address, so I spent hours flip-flopping up and down, getting the occasional whiff of coconut oil and chlorine, overhearing the soft Spanish spoken by some pool cleaners.
But I rounded each corner believing rescue would show up. Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes….
(What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)
At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.
Parched, covered in dust, with blisters the size of half dollars on both feet, I finally stood on the coast
al highway, having adopted the most desultory hitchhiking manner in history. Holding up a cardboard sign that read SAN CLEMENTE—where my pals had been surfing all day—I tried to look bored, like a girl who didn’t actually need a ride. I was a hitchhiker to aspire to.
Toward dusk, a black Volkswagen pulled up, its driver a tattered-looking doper with sleek raven hair and pork-chop sideburns. He jumped out and ran around to open my door, announcing that Tennessee men were bred to manners. Sam-u-el, his name was—short version Sam—a guy old enough to be sporting an incipient widow’s peak flanked by bald spots.
The car smelled like something left in an ice chest too long, and the back seat had been torn out, trash piled in. He claimed his old lady was gonna fry his ass if he didn’t get that mess cleaned up, but he’d driven down from Oregon and was wore out.
I said my fiancée was the same way, thus believing we’d entered into some chaste understanding. We pulled from the road’s shoulder, peace-sign roach clip swinging from the rearview.
He was a slow driver, puttering along at a tractor’s pace, and in that landscape, I had no reason for fear. Along the populated beach were tanned, bemuscled men; women whose hands bore diamonds the size of gumballs. I tried to roll the window down more, but it stuck about halfway. He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid. On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn?
I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath.
He shouted, Some live by what their own hands take. Others feed like buzzards on the carcass’s leftovers.
That’s right, I said, wondering what he was getting at. Maybe he wanted me to sell Tupperware or cosmetics door-to-door. Some of the want ads I’d answered offered that.
He said, Samson after his haircut could not break his chains, and the stones of the temple rained down.
