“Make a wish,” she said. She handed me a lit match. “Here. Try again, Einstein.”
I made a wish and blew out the match. She did not drop dead. Instead, she toasted me with red wine. My birthday migraine lasted two days.
The doctors drew blood and poked and prodded and X-rayed and scanned. Next they guessed and finally they surmised. By the time they were finished torturing me I was disappointed I didn’t have a brain tumor. Give me a cold efficient New York City ER doc any time. Big city barbers who can’t speak English and doctors who are sick to death of humanity don’t want to chat.
Our family doc back in Maine — we had one then — said red wine could cause migraines. “But you’re a little young for that.” He stopped chuckling when he noticed my frown.
“What if Moms drinks a lot of it?” I asked. I was only seven so I didn’t know I should have asked to see the doctor alone. She was standing right next to me, of course. Her eyes turned from interested concern to death lasers.
Dr. Chuckles’s eyes shifted from me to her cleavage. Me to her light mocha skin and dyed blonde highlights. Me to her full lips. Moms was a beautiful woman before the booze and the cigarette smoke cooled the hotness. Her jaw set to concrete, Moms crossed her arms in body language I could translate. “I am as embarrassed as all get out and you will pay, baby boy.”
A beautiful woman capable of sudden, sharp anger is a striking sight, like pissing off a Greek goddess who is really intent on messing you up. I’ve talked to the children of alcoholics since and we all tell the same story. When you live with an alcoholic, living rooms aren’t for living. All you can do is breathe and sometimes you can’t even do that. Home is never home. Home is house. Home is where the useless pleading and empty promises of atonement happen. Home is where the threats and punches and beatings with hairbrushes occur. Home is where you don’t want to go.
Chuckles caught Moms’s look, but nerdy men don’t want to believe hot women can be drunks so no intervention came. If I was a little younger or she was a little older or if Dr. Chuckles was someone completely different, he might have been my hero. Instead, he shook his head and stammered. “Red wine duh-duh-doesn’t work that way, kiddo.” He grinned at me with the widest mouth in Maine that wasn’t smeared on a scarecrow.
“Migraines are a hormonal thing…though, stress can also kick off a migraine.” He looked thoughtful for a moment — me to her cleavage, me to her cleavage. More nervous chuckling. “But you’re a little young for stress, too, aye-uh?” Dr. Chuckles. Diagnosis: idiot. (And yes, people who say aye-uh in Maine are not confined to Stephen King novels.)
Other causes of migraines include cheese, ice cream, chocolate, caffeine and Moms impaling herself on any dick attached to a guy who’s kind of a dick. Naturally I was screwed up. We were still living in Orono when Moms moved on to Lawyer Dad’s luxurious, slippery-when-wet sheets.
“Highest thread count of the bunch,” she told me about Lawyer Dad. “This one’s a keeper!”
I lost the sight in my left eye for an afternoon over that factoid. “Blinding headache.” Cliché, but too real.
Chuckles sent me to a therapist because when experts fail you, they blame you. They might even want to punish you. The tough cases always end with you trapped in a tiny IKEA-stuffed office with a Psycho Therapist. They doodle. You blame your mother. That’s how therapy works. Or doesn’t.
Dr. Moto, my voyeur-pedophile, was a vulture who’d found a way to make a living squeezing juice from bones and picking at brains. Moto said he could help with my “me-graines.” (Decreasing them, I had assumed.) He was a Japanese-British transplant who was pretty smug about spreading mental health amongst us New England colonials. In the first minute of our first session he told me his treatment style was a mix of Freudian and proto-Jungian.
Uh-huh.
Keep in mind I was only ten by then, but I wasn’t the naïve little kid I’d been at age seven. I got a heavy waft of shit of the bull right away. “Yeah, like whatever, dude.” I was a sassy ten, face closing fast. I was almost sure he was a big fake, like maybe he was one of those guys who spends a layover at a British airport and keeps the plummy accent for life.
The first few sessions were the usual. I blamed Moms for everything which, in my case, was one of those clichés that happen to be Eternal Truths. He’d nod and ask me what my responsibility was. I repeated each time that I was ten so, “nada-colada manana, baba!”
Dr. Moto plucked his eyebrows so thin they could have been a faint pencil line. He talked much more than I did so staring at the empty space above his eyes passed some of the fifty-minute hour. Whenever I said anything about Moms he wrinkled his forehead really hard to yank those almost-eyebrows up toward where his hair used to be.
He asked if I thought it was significant that I used the plural, always Moms never Mom.
“Yes and no,” I said. “No, because I’ve always called her Moms since forever. Maybe yes, I s’pose…” Then I shut up. “Actually, no and no.”
I didn’t want to explain Drunk Mom and Sober Mom but I’ll lay it out here so my future biographers don’t screw that up, too. Drunk Mom yelled a lot. Sober Mom woke up and baked cookies made with peanut butter and the sweet honey of Regret. And always the promises to do better. For me, her, us. Eventually Moms proposed too many toasts so she blacked out. She couldn’t remember all her yelling. No more cookies.
The Psycho’s answer to my cookielessness was lists. To-do lists. To-dream lists. To-be lists. “I will Moto-vate you,” he said.
(Yeah. I know. Jesus!)
He told me stress caused the chemical cascade that caused my headaches. “Chemical cascade” doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Like a gentle pink and purple waterfall might be involved. I would have felt I was taken seriously if he’d described it the way it felt. Something like “You’re tied to the tracks and the Hormone Train runs over your head with steel wheels and rips out your pumpkin brains. Then the whole train backs over what’s left and grinds your brains away all over again.”
Moto was probably all rah-rah, ziss-boom-bah on the list-making thing because it was the only thing he had in his pocket besides a raging boner. When all you have is a raging boner, everything looks like something you should nail.
Lists would get my world in order. I feel the need to point out one more time that I was only ten. I did not own a cape. Bullets did not bounce off my chest and I did not have a cave full of bats and cool but implausible weapons. Getting the world in order seemed like a job for somebody taller.
Still, I have to admit, it’s one of the few homework assignments I’ve ever completed. (Life’s full of firsts and lasts.) I still make lists even though it feels somewhat shitty, like I’m admitting Moto taught me something useful. Like I have to justify my little capitulation to you. Like I owe Dr. Moto for something despite him getting paid. Despite what he did.
Everybody was antsy about my progress toward pain-free mental perfection so I started making the goddamn lists in a goddamn little silver notebook. I had my reasons to follow through. I already had to keep a pain diary for the neurologist so this wasn’t that different. I had a Whining Weiner Dad (I forget which one) paying the shrink’s bill so one of them pushed Moms to push me. As if migraines are a choice.
More pathetic, Moms’s toasts were beginning to sound like slurred prayers. “To my beloved son’sh recovery from migrainesh and shtresh!” Yeah. I know. Cartoony drunk.
Warming up, I made a list of movies I liked — Star Wars and anything with John Leguizamo in it. I was especially fond of Executive Decision. John helps save the day. Steven Seagal and his tough-guy ponytail gets blown out of a Stealth jet almost immediately. Give the people what they want.
Next, I itemized my pet peeves: School work (mostly irrelevant). Homework (as if any rational adult would tolerate working at home.) I squeezed bullies between the first two items. I scrawled Team Dad at the top of my list. Also at the bottom and somewhere in the upper middle. I was pe
evish. I wrote the word “therapy” several times but Moto zeroed in on the Dads.
Bio-Dad AKA Bad Dad, formerly Romeo Sr. until I knew better. Last name: Basilon, so, a Jewish guy who thought, for awhile, that Moms’s Hispanic ass was kosher. Location: The Wind (rumored to have fled West but that’s all Moms would say.) Given all that happened later, he might have been the smartest of the bunch.
Rebound Dad. Self-appointed Lt. Colonel in the KISS Army. This was the one who let me stay up late to watch movies I was too young to see. Him, I liked. Last seen: On his doorstep, shirtless, waving goodbye to me with one hand. For Moms he used his other hand to wave, but with just one finger.
When Moms peeled out of his driveway she left a lot of black rubber tire on the white concrete. It was Rebound Dad’s junky old car we lit out in. I didn’t question that at the time, but looking back, it proves he was sure she’d return to him. It also shows that one vagina not only buys you more pathetic dicks than you need, but you can fill your pockets with balls, too.
I waved to him through the rear window’s dirty glass. “Waving” sounds like it was to say goodbye. What do you call what you do with your arms when you’re waving for help? Whatever you call it, I did that until Rebound Dad was just a dot. He never got his car back.
Slick Dad AKA “Schmuck.” He and Moms made the driveway scene in Item #2 happen. According to my teachers I had “defiance issues” by then and I got the feeling Cheater Dad would have loved to cure me of said issues with the thick end of a pool cue.
However, Schmuck was under strict orders to leave the discipline to her. The Schmuck knew who buttered his dick so he did this passive aggressive thing where he shut up whenever I entered the room. It was like we were playing a game of Statue Tag with insane rules.
He smiled like a fish in a freezer, positive that I’d crack and beg him to speak to me. Dude was clueless. Passive aggressive is better than aggressive aggressive every time. Cheater Dad didn’t last long. I miss the peace and quiet we had when Moms was out revenge-fucking his secretary.
Last seen: Who cares?
Lawyer Dad. He was the dude with the high thread count. His job was supposed to be digging alimony out of #3. He got distracted.
We lived at his house for almost a year. Moms yipped “Henry! Henry! Henry!” almost every night. Expensive sheets, maybe, but Lawyer Dad’s house had criminally thin walls. Last seen? His driveway, pleading with Moms to be reasonable. He did not know her well.
Dr. Moto was the next man-freak in our lives, though our sessions were confined to twice a week for a month and a half. I hoped he was gay so he wouldn’t get sucked into that horny vortex Moms called a mouth. They never hooked up.
At first I attributed his professional restraint to the fact that Moms was a drunken slut and possibly a carrier of numerous STDs. She was a hub in a network of cheating partners and their sluts. Wrong. He had his eyes on me.
When I showed Moto my Bad Dads list, he looked through his notes to compare Dad timelines with my headaches. “Have you noticed you get an increase in the frequency and severity of your me-graines each time your mother…er…has a new man in her life?”
“My” me-graines. As if I owned them instead of the other way around.
“Does it bother you, your mother going through a man once a year, bouncing from one to the next?”
Bouncing.
Must. Stare. At. Eyebrows.
“Romeo?”
Moto always asked me questions to which he already knew the answer. When I called him on it, he said his questions helped me “stay engaged.” I remember he was very concerned about my “practiced disaffection” and, when I was really bored, “disassociation.” I could only guess that the concept of Cool was not available in Japan or England when Dr. Moto was growing up.
“Romeo, you know I care about you, right?”
Bouncing. Bouncing.
“Romeo, you know I want to help you, correct?”
Henry! Henry! Henry!
“Romeo, you don’t have to face this alone.”
Eyebrows. Eyebrows!
I teared up. A hot baby tear escaped. My face wasn’t slammed shut quite enough to make it stop. Not then. Not yet. I still had hope.
Then Psycho made his move. Maybe he told himself he was helping me. Maybe he was still pretending that we aren’t all just looking out for ourselves.
“Do you want to know the real secret to the perfect cure for me-graines, Romeo?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, Dr. Moto. I’d like the pain to keep pushing through my head like a rusty fucking spike.” I said it as cheerfully as I could. It’s kind of funny that way.
“Have you started masturbating yet?” He leaned forward in his chair. The walls sucked closer and the air got thin. My face heated up. My chair pressed hard into my back which didn’t make any sense until I figured out it was me pushing into the chair. Even so, it felt like the chair was pushing me toward Moto.
“Nope,” I lied. “No, uh…”
“Masturbation!” His face was like a light. “You should start now.” Big used car salesman smile, so eager to rust-proof my undercarriage and hose my trunk.
“Now?” Wax the dolphin? Strip the gears on the stick shift? Jerk the wad? Churn the butter? “Here?”
“It’s all about rerouting blood away from your brain. When the me-graine starts, there’s less blood in your brain. That’s when you see the haloes around lights and things seem brighter and louder and you feel nauseous.”
I felt nauseous then, but it wasn’t the Migraine Train steaming into the station.
“Then the body overcompensates,” he said. “The body sends too much blood to the brain.”
Stupid, stupid body!
“Blood vessels press on surrounding structures and the pain is…well, you know best what the pain is like.” Again, the come-to-Jesus smile.
Oh, yes. I knew the pain. It was like he was saying, “Jerk off or die.” He let his bare, smug face hang open. Way too many small, sharp white teeth to be human. “Masturbation is the secret cure for headaches and stress such as yours.”
“Um. Uh-huh?”
He moved one hot, sweaty hand to my thigh, rubbing up and down. Mostly up. I thought his hand might burn through my jeans. His other hand covered his crotch.
I jumped up and ran out. Moms was in the waiting room when I burst through the office door. “Cured!”
A week later, fuelled by Lawyer Dad alimony, we ran away to New York. Together, as mother and son, we each ran a solitary race. She ran to. I ran from.
I’ve only got one picture of myself as a little kid. I’m all big cheeks and bright eyes and curly black hair. My face looks so…I don’t know. Open? Living with Mom in New York closed me up. What happened later, with me and Juliet and Jerome? That’s how I worked my way back to bright eyes.
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