Those of you who know me know that I'm generally pretty open about my childhood. My life didn't follow an American norm, at least amongst the people who know me now. The first ten years or so of my life, I lived in a trailer park. My sister had some kind of brain disease. My half-brother was a criminal. My best friend was a fire bug. My parents were involved in the drug trade.
I don't remember how old I was, but it was probably when I was nine or ten. That's my age, now--I can't remember when things happen and the older things are getting fuzzy. But the big brush strokes are there, and some finer details. I had to be about ten because it was a school night and my sister was old enough to sleep over at a friend's house. My parents weren't really strict about these things--rules were mostly considered limits of personal liability--but still, she had to be about twelve for that to seem normal to other people, so I was probably nine or ten.
My mother woke me up early in the morning, when morning is really just a formality of the clock. It was one or two in the morning. She said, "Do you want to go for a ride?" I mumbled something from my bunk bed, surrounded by those yellow and black gas pump octane rating stickers, about how I had to sleep and go to school in a few hours. She said she'd call the school and let them know I was sick or something. I didn't get a lot of sick days--I barely ever got sick as a kid--so this seemed like a treat. I rubbed my eyes, climbed down, and got dressed. I was not really awake.
We lurched into the ancient Chevy Caprice wagon with the faded and peeling vinyl wood pattern on the side. The beast was yellow, at one point, kind of a butter color, but now it had all the charm of an abandoned amusement park ride on the sea shore of a post-apocalyptic Lake Erie. Zombie skin in space. The belts on the massive truck engine that propelled the beast wailed to life, calming to a rhythmic whimper once they received some heat and friction. The story was, my parents got this car in trade for an overdue commodities invoice from "some Russians." To translate, a guy who probably had a Polish surname owed them money and rather than pay, he gave them this massive station wagon. It ran, fair trade.
I bunked down in the cargo area of the beast. I found it comfortable to kind of use the spare tire well as a nook and stared out the window until it got light out. I still can't sleep in a moving car. Eventually, I flipped through some comic books I brought. I had cookies, maybe? Now, with my son and road trips, it seems insane that I wouldn't have had some kind of snack, but then again, we were different.
I knew the route, somewhat. It was the way we went to visit the Farm--a place in southern Ohio where my aunt and uncle maintained a farmhouse on a mostly-wooded, hilly plot with a pond we would swim in almost every summer. I don't think they lived there, except maybe a few months here and there in spring and summer. My uncle's father, who I think was named Joe, would rail at us for sliding down the hay bales, ruining their rectangular alignment. So some kind of business was being done at the Farm. I remember cows wandering through now and then. We cut down a cherry tree there one year and burned the wood on the campfire. It was the best smelling fire I've ever had. I sliced my knee open with a filleting knife when I was seven. My father blasted a snake out of the pond with a .22 rifle, once. It leapt three feet out of the water. I killed a bird there.
So down we went, through southern Ohio, toward Marietta. When we crossed into West Virginia, we found my father and his friend, Larry, in a gravel lot somewhere. I don't know where it was, but it felt like we were in sight of the Ohio border. The men looked bad. They looked like they'd been in a bunker for weeks. Unshaven, red-eyed, sweat stains on their shirts. They went about loading bags into the car, somberly, while I was instructed to stay in the back. When Larry finally sat in the back seat, he looked over his shoulder at me with something between annoyance and a sneer. Larry was an asshole. Larry was always an asshole. That was kind of the punchline of the trip.
As I remember the story, my father and Larry had driven Larry's silver Mazda RX-7 down to Florida the week before for business. Specifically, they were going to Miami to buy drugs. Lots of drugs. The image of two kind of rednecky Ohio dudes rolling down to Little Havana to purchase primo product in the height of the drug business is kind of hilarious. I imagine they blended in like an orange construction cone in a Renoir painting. I don't know many details of the trip as it was relayed to me or as I picked up from overhearing conversation (I was trying to read my Spider Man comics, after all), but a few bits of the saga remain.
My father and Larry were set to meet a contact in a restaurant somewhere. They said "Mexican" but I think it was probably Cuban. Either way, nobody spoke English. Larry, already coked to the gills, was bouncy and paranoid. "HOLY SHIT, Tom," said Larry, to my father, who is Tom, "What are we going to do? I don't speak fucking Mexican, how will we order drinks? I wanna fucking beer! How do you say 'beer' in Mexican?"
"Don't worry," replied my father, "I got this." He raised his hand, got the attention of a waiter and extended two fingers. "Yo asshole!" he ordered, "Two!"
Larry: "What the FUCK? Are you trying to get us fucking killed?"
"Shut up, Larry." Two beers arrived. Eventually, so did their contacts.
Later, while driving back north, in the loaded RX-7, Larry decided they needed to eat. Screaming down the highway in the middle of the night, he exclaimed, "I'm fucking hungry, let's get a BURGER." It was late, and they were in West Virginia. Back then, in the late 80's, the culture was still not quite 24/7. Highways in West Virginia were dark, and those signs that said GAS FOOD LODGING mattered. It wasn't so much as to whether they had YOUR gas station as much as whether they had ANY gas station within 20 or 30 miles of the exit.
[Entertainingly, the exit that led to the Farm back in the 80s was barely paved as I remembered it. Last time I drove that stretch of highway, the Woodsfield exit off 77 now has a McDonalds, a Sunoco, a Pilot Travel Plaza, and a hotel. Progress!]
So they're cruising along and Larry wants a burger. He asks my father, "Look in the bag, see if we got any cash." This was kind of a funny request. Larry was driving, my father was in the passenger seat. The rest of the RX-7 was pretty crowded with gym bags full of product. "The bag" as he put it was one of those old-timey physician's medical bags, the leather kind with a handle that open up square, like they'd have in house calls on TV. It's where they kept their cash. I imagine, if you only had 100's and 20's, you could fit a sizeable sum in there. My father fishes out the bag and pulls out a wad of one dollar bills, probably in a strap, so either $100 or $200 in there (in 30 years, the value of the dollar is about half, so it would be worth $200-$400 today). Larry sees the denomination and says, "What the fuck is that?"
Somewhat puzzled, my father replies, "It's about a hundred dollars, Larry."
"That BITCH!" Larry spat. He was referring to his wife, Lynn, who packed the bag. "That bitch! I told her not to put any of that shit in there!" That 'shit' being small bills. "What does she think we are, amateurs?" The idea here being, that if they were seen with a bunch of $1s, their professional counterparts in south Florida would not deal with them because they're small time.
Larry snatches the bills out of my father's hand and flips them up through the slightly ajar sunroof of the RX-7. My father said you could see the bundle explode in the light of the tail lights, like chaff from a military plane. Entertained--my father was also pretty high at this point--he dug around and found another bundle of $1s, and another, and handed them to Larry. Enraged, Larry tossed each bundle up at the sunroof, hard. One bundle twisted off his fingertips and hit the sunroof just... so. The hinge on the sunroof broke and the glass started flapping and banging at high speed (they were driving very fast, and air has certain physical properties...). It was a fearsome racket. Larry blasphemed, my father giggled, eventually coughing into full laughter.
Eventually, they both calmed down enough to realize they'd have to stop and do something about it. After a minute or so of silence, Larry--now tensely collected--says to my father, "Are there any fives in there? If so, we'll pitch those, too."
At some point they lost control of the RX-7 and embedded it in an embankment. It was close enough for them to walk to a payphone and call my mother, far enough out that the various state police agencies didn't find them first. We rumbled down the highway to get them, in the wee hours of the morning.
So that's my mom. She's the one who would wake her kid up and take him out of school to drive all the way across the state to pick up her husband and his idiot friend who got themselves in some shit because they were arrogant and high and dumb and loaded down with a life jail sentence if she didn't go and save them. The way she dealt with my father and Larry was a kind of bored disdain. "This is not cool," said the look on her face, and the men knew better than try to justify themselves.
Somehow, despite the crazy shit that happened through the years, and the insanity of how everything played out, especially after I was old enough to know the truth, she made this all seem normal. We could have been hunkered down during some World War and she'd have the same kind of dismissive eye-roll over whatever hair-brained stuff people did to try to get killed.
The rest of the day was my father and Larry transporting all their shit around, while my mother and I chilled out and watched TV. I think it was Friday, then. My sister called and extended her sleepover at her friend's house (at least that was the story) so she didn't see the men dragging themselves around like castaways all day. I think we ordered pizza.
The end result of all of this is that my parents managed to sock away some cash that helped us get out of the trailer park and ultimately paid to keep my sister alive when she developed that brain disease. It was hard watching them go through withdrawal, setting up phone taps on their friends' houses, shooting guns in the dark. It was hard to watch them fight when they were drunk or stoned. It was hard to come to terms with the fact my parents were doing highly criminal shit that could have sent them to jail forever. Friends of theirs ended up in federal prison, or dead. One of their clients was a county prosecutor and he had a spectacular failure when I was in high school. I saw him on the weekly news and thought, "I know that guy."
Lucky for us, we made it through. Unlike most of my friends growing up, my parents stayed together for the long haul. Everyone else who had normal problems like mortgages and swim lessons, their families split up. My parents, they gave me a different perspective. Stability in the storm, and awareness that there is ALWAYS a storm. Through that, I learned how to calmly deal with pretty much anything. I'm the one you call in to calm those fuckers down when granny is in the hospital and the aunts are all in hysterics. I can also accept almost anyone, no matter how apparently reprehensible their actions or their selves may be. I judge, but don't condemn. I know who you are and I respect it, but I will absolutely tell you if you're fucked up. And I learned to love music.
So thanks, Mom. You did it. You kept me going and taught me that you do things that are necessary, even when it's not cool, and that you order pizza when you're done.
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