My father’s exit had been so convenient, so seamless for him that it seemed impossible he hadn’t planned it. He’d walked into a new life in which his family didn’t exist, had never existed. He didn’t even need to flee us. We had been unwritten.
Months out of a marriage of nearly twenty years, he already had a new woman. Who, we didn’t know, and of course he played dumb. But we had proof of his betrayal. My mother showed me a letter she found in the back of a book he had been reading. It wasn’t addressed to anyone, and it wasn’t signed, but it was written in his hand, so loving, so tender that he could not have been writing to my mother. I was dying to confront him about it, but Mom swore me to secrecy—he could not know that I knew.
My parents struggled to keep the bills paid with two kids in college as they sorted out the divorce. My mother had been out of the workforce for eighteen years, raising us kids: she had no resume, no professional references, no marketable skills. Still, nothing was going to stand in the way of taking care of her children. “You do what must be done,” she had told us as children, and we’d seen her live those words, time and again.
“Well, if there’s one thing I know how to do after raising you kids, it’s baking. Cookies, muffins, bread . . . just point me to the eggs, flour, butter, and sugar and stand back!” She got a job working in the bakery department at Albertsons for minimum wage, sneaking the stale cookies home in her purse for her and Tashina to eat. She never let it get her down. My parents had both been poor farm kids so we weren’t indoctrinated in social stratification. A job was a job, and any job had dignity. Still, I burned inside to think of her in her Albertsons uniform and hairnet, bagging bagels in clear plastic gloves, a servant to the sneering locals.
That spring, at my father’s insistence, my mother tried to refinance our house. The bank told her that, as a matter of course, there was no reason to refinance their mortgage because my parents hadn’t missed a single payment. Though they had the money in their account, she didn’t make the house payment one month. The bank immediately initiated foreclosure proceedings. It wasn’t enough that my father had abandoned us; the bank had played us for fools, and we were now to be driven from our home.
We unceremoniously disposed of our pets. Tasha, our gorgeous, airhead Afghan hound—she had knocked herself out by running into not just a sliding glass door but also a tree—was given to a snooty but kindhearted old lady. Zeke, Tatyana’s gregarious golden retriever, who spoke to us and wagged his tail so hard his rear legs skittered back and forth across the hardwood floor, went to a group that brought animals to visit old folks’ homes and the terminally ill. Our three cats, too, were handed off like old clothes.
Katie was my dog, a black lab born on my mother’s birthday, whom we got from an animal shelter. As a puppy, she used to fall asleep inside my shirt. When she got bigger, she slept on my bed every night. She wasn’t a particularly obedient dog, but I taught her a trick much better than heeling or doing something so banal as sitting on command. When I tapped my chest, Katie would jump up, put her front paws on my shoulders, kiss my face, then put her head next to mine and draw me in for a hug. God, I loved her. Katie would go to a fussy young family my mother had found, a family I had zero feeling for. There was nothing to be done about it.
Our oldest dog, Princess, an abused Afghan hound mix we had adopted from the pound when I was six, did not have to be given away. My father owned a La-Z-Boy recliner my mother had given him for Christmas before they had us kids, before they had any money. She had saved up her earnings from taking pictures for the local newspaper, bought the La-Z-Boy from Sears, and hid it at a friend’s house. On Christmas Day, she had brought my father over there to surprise him. Princess crawled into my father’s easy chair one night, a chair that had always been off-limits to her, and quietly died.
My mother found Princess the next morning and was allowed the rare pleasure of burying her dog in the backyard before our house was repossessed. It seemed like a good, lasting fuck-you to my father from the dog he’d never wanted.
We sold everything we could at a garage sale that stretched on interminably. My father’s Ford Taurus, our Aerostar minivan, our furniture and TV, my Atari, my Nintendo, board games, toys, dishes, clothes: everything must go. We had so much useless crap—a jogging trampoline? Nightmare, the VCR board game? Garbage bags full of stuffed animals, Popples and Pound Puppies and Cabbage Patch Kids. Literally tons of cheap plastic molded into GI Joes and Barbies and Ninja Turtles and My Little Ponies. Had we really needed this? My vast crates of Lego, my library of Choose Your Own Adventure books . . . how much of this self-indulgent garbage would we have to un-buy in order to have enough money to keep our home? How much, or how agonizingly little?
It was crap, undoubtedly crap, literally crap, just plastic and wood pulp offal . . . but also somehow meaningful, drenched as it was in the nostalgic sweetness of my childhood, our life together, perfect in the rearview mirror. And now the whole town parading through the detritus of our life? Our condescending neighbors who had sneered at us because we were “from away,” because Tashina and Chuong were brown, leaving muddy footprints on my mother’s carpet, haggling us down to the last dime on everything, a death of nickels, of pennies. First the hyenas, then the vultures, then the maggots. Fifty cents was forty cents too much for my mother’s old Neil Diamond tape that she had played in the car on the way to the grocery store for how many years now? I couldn’t remember a time in my life before I knew the words to “Brother Love’s Traveling Show.”
Only once did I see my mother lose it. During spring break, while other collegians were pouring Smirnoff vodka into bottles of Sprite in Daytona Beach, grinding, flashing, and sunburning under the blue Florida skies, while my more affluent fellow Simon’s Rockers were in Europe or Mexico or South America, I nursed lukewarm Budweisers with my mom while people trickled into our driveway, poking through our crap. I didn’t bother to hide my beer. Fuck what they thought. We were never coming back.
Finally, the rain came. My mother and I, groggy from the shitty beer, scrambled to drag everything back into the garage, out of the drizzling rain. Then it started to pour. We were fucked. The couches, the carpets, the books, the jigsaw puzzles turning slowly into gray mush . . . my mother started to curse on the front drive.
“Shit, shit, shit! God damn it! God damn it! I . . . why? Oh, God, why?”
Tears filled her eyes, and the words hung up in her throat. Her knees went, but I caught her before she hit the ground and carried her into the front room, the same place where she had had to scrape me off the floor only months earlier, when I had collapsed after reading about the divorce. I got her up to her bed, sobbing so hard she couldn’t speak. “Shit” was pretty common for her, elicited by a banged thumb or a parking ticket. “God damn” was a much bigger deal for our mother, raised Catholic. She cried so infrequently that it was still traumatic to witness. None of us had ever seen her break down like this, even when her father died.
I moved what I could and covered what I couldn’t move. Then I walked out to the mailbox in the rain and opened it. There was nothing inside. I closed it and sat down where I had when I’d gotten my acceptance letter from Simon’s Rock almost exactly a year before. How optimistic I’d been, how eager to leave this place behind. I’d hated my father, hated my family, hated this house.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad. I had loved my mother. And Tashina. I had loved Tatyana too, listening to the Doors and playing cards together in the camper. And my dad, especially my dad. More than any one of us, I had loved all of us, our family, the thing we became when we were all together.
I looked back at the house, at the big dining room bay window. The lights were off inside—to save money—and I couldn’t see in, but I remembered that window glowing. Every night, we had gathered there in the dining room. It was my job to set the table and Tatyana’s job to clear it. Dad sat at the head. We all sat down together, each of us in our specific spots. No hats at the table, no books at the
table, and certainly no TV. We ate together and laughed together and talked about the day we’d had. And now this, an abrupt betrayal, and then the slow, cold, public humiliation. I wished we had just burst into flames, sitting there around the family dinner table, hiding our broccoli under the chicken bones on our plates, sneaking scraps to the dogs. At least in death, we would have been together.
I walked into the garage and fell into my father’s La-Z-Boy, the chair Princess had died in. Drenched to the bone, I grimly forced down the rest of the warm beer, watching the rain rattling off the tarps and folding tables, the last yard sale slowly dying on the lawn in front of me.
It hadn’t been any of our crap that had bankrupted us at all, I realized. The hammock chairs, the cross-country skis, the mini pool table, the weight bench I had never used . . . they were all innocent. It was Simon’s Rock. It was my fancy overpriced college for “sensitive” kids who couldn’t hack it in high school—$23,000 a year my parents hadn’t prepared for. It was the kid who’d never been able to manage a night’s sleep on his own, who’d depended on his parents even to go to school to get away from them. It was me.
Tears came, but I choked them back down. I had cried enough. Tears wouldn’t help. I had to be strong.
I stared out at the rain falling on the shrapnel of our exploded family and made a solemn vow: I swear to you, Mom, I will take your revenge. I will make it up to you, I will make this right. Not justice, because how fucking naive can you be? This couldn’t be undone. But you will get the good things you deserve. And our traitorous father, he will get what he deserves. I will make a mark on this world. I will take the pain you put on the person I love above all others, magnify it a thousand times, and then turn it back on you motherfuckers.
At the end of the school year, spending the last night in our old house was like crawling into bed with a corpse. Tatyana had stayed in Boulder for the entire, drawn-out death rattle of the last six months. Tashina was staying the night at a friend’s house. Without ever discussing it, Tatyana, my mother, and I did our best to shield her from the worst as the poor kid had seemed lost even before the divorce. My father was long gone, in California with his sports car and his secretary, but then, he’d been gone for years, hadn’t he?
Mom and I slept on the floor of my bedroom because it was carpeted. The beds had been packed or sold or just given away. We drank whiskey out of a plastic bottle, covered ourselves with our coats, and cuddled up with Katie for warmth. In the morning, my mother would drop Katie at her new home, then head to Colorado to join Tatyana. Tashina and I would catch a Greyhound bus to Saskatchewan, where she would crash with family and I would pump gas at our uncle’s general store.
“Think of it as one grand adventure,” Mom had told us.
Even Tashina knew that was bullshit. Adults were so full of shit. We knew adventures—hiking the Grand Canyon, descending to the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns, and, the queen mother of them all, driving from New Mexico to Alaska with Mom one summer. This wasn’t an adventure. This was exile.
When the sun rose, my family scattered to the winds. The bank took our house. Everything else was already gone.
CHAPTER 3
Working-Class Zero
Five days before graduation from Simon’s Rock, I got an alcohol infraction. As the entire student body was underage (some as young as fourteen), Simon’s Rock had a strict alcohol policy. One infraction landed you on social probation; two infractions in a year were grounds for expulsion. This was my third alcohol violation of the semester. I was summoned before the Judicial Committee, our disciplinary panel composed of fellow students, nearly every one of whom had seen me wasted, high, or visibly hungover.
I just wanted out of Simon’s Rock’s affluent, self-congratulatory freak show. Many of my friends had elected to stay for all four years. Even if we could have afforded it, nothing could have made me stay.
I had testified at Wayne Lo’s trial. I’d answered a few mundane questions and related the story about him trying to get a gun. When they asked me to identify the defendant, I made eye contact with Wayne, pointed straight at him, and said, “There. The short guy in the cheap green suit.” I had done my part. When Wayne was sentenced a month later to life in prison without the possibility of parole, we were cheered and relieved. Finally, I could find out what had happened, what had been going on, what everyone else had known for a year. But it was all the kids on campus had been talking about for the last fourteen months, and they were sick of it. The sentencing had finally freed them, and the subject was never to be brought up again. I never talked to anyone about it, never even found out exactly what had gone on before that dark night, on the night itself, or during the many sad days that followed.
My roommate James had been kicked out. Ben White, always a dark soul, had gone much darker. He was perpetually high on cough syrup, pale and gaunt, cultivating a desolate squalor in his dorm room. Zack had been charmed by him, and then the whole school seemed to have fallen in line around these two arbiters of taste, a liberal northeastern cult built around cough syrup and gangsta rap and mockery, some kids going so far as to ape Ben White’s tics, his awkward gait, his made-up words. He’d called my girlfriend a disgusting slut in front of me, and I’d been too intimidated to respond. Finally, I had taken on both Ben White and Zack one wasted night and came away with a broken nose and two black eyes for my trouble.
I groveled before the Judicial Committee. They reminded me of my infractions over the years: the half gallon of whiskey, the half gallon of vodka, the shoplifting, the many curfew violations . . . I swore that if they would only let me walk, I would be meek as a lamb, quiet as a mouse, a humble, gracious monk of a student until graduation, then slip away and never return. Alternately, I offered that if they tossed me now, I would make such a ruckus that they would tear their hair and rend their clothes, despairing that they hadn’t had the wisdom to let me leave quietly.
They made me wait out in the hall while they deliberated. I had been accepted into the film program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a cheap school now that Tatyana and I qualified for in-state tuition, and all we could afford. Fuck this cloistered, fussy faux-intellectual utopia. I looked forward to disappearing into the crowd at a huge state school, deep undercover in my jeans, T-shirt, and baseball hat . . . if I was allowed to graduate. They couldn’t throw me out. My grades were excellent. They wouldn’t throw me out. Would they?
Finally, I was summoned back in. I would be allowed to walk on the condition that I never return. I could hardly contain my glee. Anyone could make dean’s list, but it took a special type of student to graduate on triple-secret social probation. And putting the two together as I had, being allowed to walk only on the condition that I never return, the excellent exile? I imagined a fat French chef kissing his fingers: c’est magnifique!
It was who I was: the up arrow and the down arrow in the same seventeen-year-old mannish boy. I’d read a tabloid about Elvis in a bus station that spring, about how his twin brother was stillborn. Many cultures believe that, in a set of twins, one is good and the other evil. If one of them dies, the other takes on the burden of being both good and evil. More than The Stranger, more than The Catcher in the Rye, more than any book that supposedly spoke to troubled adolescents, that tabloid told me who I was and who I would be.
We graduated. We celebrated. We annihilated and destroyed. We made a “wine machine” by hanging a box of wine from the ceiling in one of the dorms. My mom flew in from Colorado for graduation (she and Tashina had moved there so Tatyana could get in-state tuition). She drank from the wine machine to cheers from my pals. I slept in a bathtub. The next morning, when I couldn’t stop throwing up, she helped me box my stuff up to ship to Colorado.
While my mother gathered my dirty laundry and I lay on the floor dying, my girlfriend, Riley, perched on my desk, chatting with my mom and taunting me. My mom had a pile of whites and a pile of darks, and then, before I could stop her, “These sheets will finish off the d
ark load.” She pulled my mattress away from the wall, unearthing a treasure trove of a million glittering silver condom wrappers. Riley went red.
Without even looking up, my mom said, “Well, at least you’re not doing drugs,” and continued her work.
My classmates got cars or summer vacations to Europe for graduation. My mom gave me a tent. My father didn’t call.
I’d become close friends with Punk Rock Gabe, a misanthropic chain smoker with a green Mohawk stuck up with Elmer’s glue and a tattoo that said “HATE.” We planned to hitchhike across the country to Ellensburg, Washington, so I could see Riley, then up to Alaska to find work in the canneries for the summer.
We partied at upperclassmen’s houses in town. I made love to Riley one final time, on the roof of the hardware store. The next day, my mother drove Gabe and me out to my art teacher’s house. My art teacher’s son Manu, a massive New Zealander with dreads down to the middle of his back, more mountain man freak than hippie, was going to give us a lift as far as Ohio. His ride was packed and ready when we got there: a Toyota pickup that had been used as a pace truck for off-road races, its battered body emblazoned with huge Miller High Life logos, Manu’s teepee poles arched over the cab like a bow, bent and lashed to the front and rear bumpers. The bed of the truck was full of his gear, including a tiny fridge that plugged into the cigarette lighter to keep his homebrewed beer cold.
Gabe and I tucked our backpacks snugly in the back of the truck, leaving just enough space for one person to curl up into a ball. My pack had been a gift from Errol, a man my mother had befriended in Colorado. It wasn’t enough for her to work full-time answering phones in a call center in addition to looking after us kids, so she volunteered with an outreach organization that worked with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Errol was an aspiring writer and a recovering cokehead. He had dreamed of writing a book called “Jonesing Around Boulder” about being a ski bum with a head full of snow, but instead he just spent his life jonesing around Boulder. He and I had become friends over the winter break, so he’d given me his old external-frame backpack. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be well enough to use it again,” he had said. A couple of months later, Errol shot himself in the face with a shotgun.
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