A Long Time Coming (part 3)

She dropped me off at the Pierre Public Library, and told me to get a leg up in case I couldn't get into school right away. And so I did. I headed right for the mystery section, and pulled three books at random off the shelf. I flipped to page 50 and then forward from there. There's almost always a good sex scene in the first 50 pages of a mystery, unless they're old, or christian, or both. “She allowed her honey-colored breasts to fall out of the simple white bra, and I bent forward to lick her nipples with renewed exuberance.” Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all. An ace on the first book I picked up.
I flipped forward, then back again, and then wrote down the title and page number in my tattered little notebook (whose first page was missing. I didn't want to read my mother's bouncing mash of feel good hallmark sentiment cheering me on to “find myself,” every time I looked for something worthwhile to read. And the only thing I ever thought of reading, then, could be found in the first fifty or hundred pages of a cheap paperback.
Or not, as I found by looking through the two others. I rushed forward, not in pages one through fifty, so then a hundred through fifty. Soon I was at the end, finding the dashing detective, or writer, or doctor, platonically hugging the ex-prostitute. The next one had a Scientist finding out his research university was being funded by a shady group, and the cadavers he opened daily were their victims. There was a black girl, and a white woman, but the menage a trois that seemed promised never arrived.
I looked up from my little pile of books, knowing that I was giving it up with how slyly I looked for adult supervision. There was a girl standing at the end of my aisle, in bright blue shorts and a tank top. She wasn't skinny, or tall, or fat, or short for that matter. She turned away from the bookshelves, and started walking towards me. Her face was pretty, freckled in a way, and her breasts, which I hadn't really been impressed by in profile, rounded out, to the side of her, seeming to hold her hands at her side, and making perfect half moons against her stomache. She saw me staring.
“What are you looking at?” She didn't quite snap. The emphasis was on the are, like she was in some Mystery! program on PBS. Mystery! had poor sex scenes, mostly people my mom's age sucking face and then lying in bed.
“The Peril in Ward 9,” I held up the book, hoping my misinterpretation would work.
“I know what you're doing.” She said flatly. “Turn towards the beginning. It's extra early, and not very good.”
I did what she said, and found, to my amazement, another unclasping bra.
“Thanks,” I said, and tried to smile.
“My names Steph, do you go to school around here?”
“Not yet. I just moved.”
“Huh. I go to Feneston Regional. But we call it Penistown. See you around!”
And like that she was gone. I was frozen. I read the page in front of me. She was right, it was downright terrible. All vague metaphors and ways of referring to the bits that weren't quite like refering to bits. It all sounded like an ad for curtains. I thought of Steph, and Penistown, and how I'd never heard any girl say penis, and how I just had. I hoped I was going to Feneston. I really did. And I kinda felt like crying.

A Long Time Coming (part 2)

We layed out on the single bed in the stale smoke room, and I flipped channels as she tried her best to get her sister, my Aunt Sal, on the phone.
“Goddamn,” she said. “Wrong number again, and thought I knew it by heart.”
She started rummaging through her purse, pulling out a dozen little boxes of make-up, her own script (do-better-ol, apathin, whatever) and a dozen or so sunglasses, some of which I'd seen her wake up in, and all of which I'd seen her stand in front of a mirror, eyes puffy and cheeks ashen, trying on before noon, when she'd have had to been at work hours ago.
I turned the tv off, curled up while pulling the rough comforter over my head to block out the naked bulb at my side, and then my mother was there curling around me and cooing, the pill of hers I'd stolen kicking in as she held me tight, her legs stretching out further than mine. I had stopped growing, but well before her 5'9” and my height was just another thing to hold against herself. And she began to sing. If it weren't for all that Apathol in my blood, I knew I'd of been crying like a baby and asking why. But instead I just lay there, wondering when the singing would stop. I fell asleep before it did.

The next morning, she came up and woke me with a styrafoam cup of coffee, non-dairy creamer, and the television blaring “The Price is Right.” I drank the watery shit down and went to the toilet, while she shouted prices and chain smoked.
“If I hadn't smoked so much when you were young, you'd be taller than your granddad and me combined. Colliers are always tall. It's just a shame how you ended up.” My mother said, as I came out of the shower smelling like a hospital floor for all the cheap soap in the bathroom.
“But aren't you a handsome boy for all that. And damn, if you aren't the smartest Collier in the state,” she said, rolling the L's and omitting the “r” like some Saturday Night Live french accent.
We checked out right before we had to, and found the the highway heading west, and the snow had made everything look white and sharp, like there was nothing connected to any other thing, like the whole world was discreet objects, with snow and nothing in between. Mom found a classic rock station, and hummed along to Led Zeppelin and the Animals before looking for an oldies station, right after Eric Clapton's Cocaine started coming through fuzzy. Then it was Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis and all that.
We took the exit for Mom' parents, down a few unremarkable streets, and up the driveway where my grandparents house hulked, a ranch on a hill, brooding under pines. Gram was in a nightgown and already at the door, she let us in, giving me a kiss smelling faintly of gin. Pops was in the living room, watching an episode of Matlock, fully dressed. He insisted, every morning making my grandmother shave him, and help him get on trousers, dress shirt, belt, tie, socks, sweater (even in august), and shoes. Every morning. Since his stroke, he talked out of the side of his mouth, but he was coherent enough. “Ready to meet death just like I met Beth's parents.” He wasn't going to go to hell in his bathrobe.
I sat next to him, as the show came to an end, and my mother talked to Gram in the kitchen, mostly hushed, the occasional snap. My grandfather had a plate of coldcuts on his lap, from which he took nothing. My mother rushed in, and I could see that if she had not been crying, she was certainly close to it.
“We're going,” she said quickly. “I love you dad,” and she bent and kissed him on his forehead. He inaudibly barked a “I love you.” Or at least, that was what I thought he said. Then we were leaving, and my grandmother was hugging me close and kissing my cheeks and begging me to call her. And like that we were out the door.
Four towns over, mother pulled into a motel with “EFFICIENCIES!” in bold under the neon lit sign, like a half a kitchen were some floor show you'd drive miles to see. I waited in the car while mom went in, and then she hurried out, smiling brightly.
“Grab your bags, hon. We've got a place to stay!”
Oh god. I moved my bags in, and refused to unpack, though she insisted. I knew what these places were like. I knew what happened when we didn't make next week payment, and I wasn't ready to sign up for this cigarette-stale room for the long-haul. Mom made a list:
“1. Get a job.
2. Find a school for the boy.
3. Get some food for the boy.”
In all her lists, I'm just the Boy, like a job, a school, the boy. Mom dealt in vaguries when she put together these lists, so that she wouldn't have to hurt to bad to meet the points. A school meant any school, and a job typically meant bartending some run down place where old men talked in the inexhaustable cryptography of baseball stats and scores. And me, well, I'm the boy, not the son, the one you'd have to give up the nomads life for, not the one you'd have to settle down and work a real job for, get up early to feed and dress. No, the boy would get along in this life, just as well as in any other

A Long Time Coming (part 1)

Only the unlucky believe in luck, my mother used to say, and we believe in luck. She said this after I got kicked out of Sanford Day School, my third expulsion this year, for selling my ritalin to overachieving girls in AP English. My mother thought my attention deficiency (diagnosed, aged ten) was her punishment for not knowing who my dad was. I knew different. I knew that you don't ever get punished for the things you've done, for the sleeping around or the failures. Otherwise we'd be in a world of misery with no bit of relief, not ever. That there was still some good in the world, meant to me that atonement was coming a lot further down the road than mother could suspect. I had already figured out that you can't have both. It was either justice or luck, and each meant the other was horse shit. But telling my mother that would only get a sigh from her, and a “if you just focused that brain of yours on somethin' for any length of time, you'd be doin something worthwile.”
We were getting out of town on highway nine when she made that sigh, and we were still on nine when the snow started up. Just a few flakes at first, but soon enough we were plunged into a tornado of white, the car wrapped into fast moving blanket of white, and we with it. Mother just held the wheel tight, and started cursing up a storm of her own, under her breath, fogging up her side of the windshields with “goddamns” until we saw an Econolodge on the right. We pulled off and got a room; she borrowed the last twenty in my pocket to get it.
“There's plenty of money where were headed,” she said, and I just tried to forget about what we'd have to do to get it.