I sat there, in front of the bay window facing the street until the sun began to set and soon all I could see was my own gaping reflection. Numbly, I sat just a shadow of a person, until finally I saw two head lights approaching. My heart sunk and pounded when I thought who it might be but only my sister parks in the middle of the street. I was anxious to hear what she had to say.
She was in the house in a flash. She flew through the front door and grabbed me by my shoulders. She shook me and exclaimed " You are free Judy, you are FREE, you don't ever have to go back there" Her grip got tighter, I could feel her red acrylic nails digging into my skin. The look on her face changed from elation to concern. " Do you understand what I'm telling you...you never have to see those people again, You never have to go back to that place" She grew silent when she realized my enthusiasm didn't mirror her own. Her talons released their grip from my shoulders. "Aren't you happy? she said quietly. "Isn't this all we ever wanted?"
It was what I wanted. But I was unable to process it all. I was unable to reattach myself with reality after living so far outside of it for so long. I was relieved but I also felt overcome with guilt and sadness. I still loved my dad and felt bad for causing him so much grief.
In an instant I thought about all of the things I would miss about him. Him sitting in his recliner after a long day. My endearing task of unlacing his boots for him and struggling to get them off. They way he would recline into the chair and read for hours. Chuckle from time to time and say "Oh that Louie Lamore!"
I missed when it was just him and me eating peanut butter and butter sandwiches after my mother had all but pulled the rug out from under us. We always had grape juice in our yellow tupperware cups as we ate our sandwiches and watched Perry Mason. Both sitting behind our ancient tv trays. Every day that summer we ate the same lunch silently while watching Perry Mason in all of his black and white glory.
These memories, the good ones, I held dear. There was a time when it was just us. Before he remarried, before things got complicated.
I wondered if things could ever be that way again. I realized then that they probably wouldn't. I would never walk down into the back yard, gravel crunching under my shoes to him singing 16 tons by Tennessee Ford. " I owe my soul to the company stooooore" The smell of hot metal and the incandescent red glow of the rebar he was welding.
My freedom was overwhelming. It felt like being lost all over again. The night was black and silent other than the sound of the trains thundering down the tracks and the boat horns from the bay. Their deep lonely tones echoing in my bones.
Lynne and I left my hideout and went to the house she shared with my brother Ryan and sister Casey.
It was a large drafty house with stone floors and a big gaudy deteriorating stone waterfall in the back sitting room.
Lynne and I sat on her bed and planned out our new life together. All of the things we would do and see. All of our goals. What I would become now that I was out of isolation.
Lynne, acting as my new surrogate mother made a grocery list , set down rules, and made plans to enroll me in a new school. We went over our schedules and worked out the minor day to day details of or new cohabitation.
This was the first time I was truly hopeful. It was the first light I had seen in years. I was so excited about starting to live again. With Lynne as a new mother to replace the one who left me without even saying good bye and to replace the one who had hated that I existed.
As is life, there always is a dark underbelly waiting. One minor detail we had discussed was that Lynn's boyfriend who was currently serving time in San Quentin, was getting released in two weeks.
With that knowledge I kept having to force down a sour feeling that kept rising from my belly up into my throat. I knew my sister. I knew the type of woman she was. Always trying to tame the wild. To fix the broken. She was not happy unless she had a problem to entertain her. She always needed some sort of torment in her life. She always fell for the typical lost cause, the bad boy, she needed to be needed, to take care of people who couldn't take care of themselves, or so she thought. Like me and like Joe.
She had met Joe when she was 17 on one of his brief breaks from prison. He was of the reticent nature , one of those men who didn't feel comfortable on the outside. He had been in and out of prison since her was a teenager. Always finding a woman like Lynne to be there with a fresh start for him when his release date came up.
There are a lot of women like that. Women you wouldn't expect. Oprah is one. She once started smoking crack cocaine to keep the company of a man she loved.
With Lynne and Joe, there were no limits. It was all fire and sizzling ashes. Her good intentions sunk into a life of crime drugs and darkness.
Being young and extremely sheltered, I didn't understand a lot about human behavior. It was a frustrating and eye opening education. Watching her try and keep that man at any cost was heart wrenching. I had just boarded a sinking ship. I didn't understand things like love and addiction. I had heard about both things ruining peoples lives. I didn't understand why people couldn't just stop. It never dawned on me that people needed drugs and relationships to distract themselves from something far worse. That people had to escape the horrible realities of their minds at any cost. Unspeakable things that had happened to them or things they had done with their own hands. Bone chilling abuse and terrifying mental illness. People needed to distant themselves from the dark and unspeakable. I would soon learn all about it. About how people collapse from the inside and the drugs and problems that hold their souls captive.
Joe was a drug addict among other things. A thief, a sex addict, a drug dealer, the leader of a criminal ring, and most devastating to me a violent abuser of women. But I am jumping ahead of myself. I will explain our ruin later. First lets start with our first apartment.
Lynne and I got a shitty apartment not far from her old house. A love nest in sorts for her and Joe with a room for me too. It was to be a place for Joe to start over, a place where we could all start over. It was a terrible place for fresh starts. The other tenants were like characters out of books I've read. People I could not believe really existed until I witnessed it for myself.
The Crazy Ape
In the first floor apartment lived an insane women. She sat on a bare mattress in the middle of her empty living room bare ass naked all day with the door wide open. She was a massive women with skin so black I often couldn't see her there in her blackened room. Just her yellow eyes following my gait. She sat there with her hair short and half torn out sticking out every which way with a vacant expression on her face. Heavily medicated, she sat on that dirty mattress watching tv with her massive black tits resting on her lap. Her thick tarry nipples like two tumorous knots at the bottom of each sack of flesh. Other than her exhibitionism or lack of inhibitions she never bothered anyone. I never heard her speak a word, grunts but no audible words or phrases. She reminded me of a gorilla in the zoo. I rushed past as if at any moment her knuckles would hit the floor and she would be pounding towards me. The only time I would see her out and dressed would be when she would go to cash her government checks. In these situations she should throw on a huge filthy dress and sandals. Her toenails hanging over the edge of the sandal and scratching at the asphalt as she lumbered on.
Lady Sings the Blues
Among the other residents of this colorful apartment community was a lovely couple name Carla and Ken and their two school aged girls. The children were sweet but ferrell as they come. I sometimes felt sorry for them. Their dirty faces looking up at me so shyly. Ken and Carla were drunks. They bickered constantly throughout the day. Ken was a typical middle aged white trash guy who wore too much camo . He drove the girls to school on a suspended license. Who knows how many DUI's they had between them. They both had unstable menial jobs. I would see them in various uniform polo shirts throughout my stay there.
Ken was quiet but would often be pushed into a white rage when Karla kept teasing him. Every night Carla would stand on the 6x3 concrete slab that was her porch in her finest negligé's. Her favorite was a long black slip with a sweetheart neckline and a matching black satin robe. That concrete slab was her stage after she had had a couple drinks. Every night, with her liquor and her satin, she would howl out the blues. She reminded me of a modern day down and out Janis Joplin type. Long frizzy brown hair falling over her rounded shoulders. I can still hear the clinking of ice in her glass between songs, smell her boozy breath floating through our common area. I was amazed by her delusion, her shamelessness, her sadness. Night after night she belted out her songs of sorrow for the whole block to hear. I liked Carla and Ken. I thought their bickering was funny and found her sad singing to be a little endearing.
Years after we moved out. After everything crumbled and burned, I heard that Ken had shot and killed Carla and is doing life in prison. Their daughters were sent to foster homes in Arkansas and went on to be teenage mothers.
Lady of the Night
As if that was not enough entertainment, there was a prostitute and her pimp "Bubba" living there with their small daughter. Bubba was a huge black guy who resembled Biggie Smalls. He spent his days cruising around town in his white range rover, pulling over every time he saw a young girl walking alone from school. By night he was his girlfriend's bodyguard. I rarely saw his girlfriend in the day light. At night I would hear her clicking through the common space with her ridiculous heels. I would rush to the window to get a glimpse as if she were a vampire shrouded in mystery. I saw her in various wigs, the bruises on her legs glowing blue and green under the florescent courtyard lamps. Lynne and I were very curious about her. We talked about her in hushed voices as if she was a ghoul who would appear in the mirror when we turned out the bathroom lights.
One of the rare days she was out of her apartment before midnight, our paths crossed. She asked me if she could use the dryer in the laundry room first because she was going on a "date". Lynne had talent for getting people to open up to her. Open up is the wrong term. More like spill everything about themselves to her. Grotesque over sharing.People would confess their darkest secrets to her for no reason at all. Looking back, Lynne just knew what questions to ask and when to shut up and listen. The hooker told Lynne about how easy the money was. How she would spend 30 minutes in a hotel while Bubba was right outside the door in case any funny business occurred. She said it was fun and made her feel powerful and that she could get Lynne and me into the business. We sheepishly declined, shaking her heads, both feeling a little jarred by her blasé attitude toward selling herself. We didn't like her talk of all of that easy money when we were so poor and so chaste. After that day whenever we heard her heels clicking down the halls at night we wouldn't rush to the window, we would both get a distant sober look in our eyes.
The Lost Boys
The other residents were a poor white family with grown sons. The sons looked like men but had the maturity of boys. Their parents were hard working and barely scraping by. The boys were always drinking with their friends on their balcony. Assaulting us with their brainless conversations and embarrassingly lewd and simple vernacular. They actually saddened me the most. Night after night drinking plastic bottled vodka in their tattered wife beaters and Raiders hats. The fluorescent porch lights revealing patches of bad skin and rows of crooked teeth. Drunkenly talking about how they might have an "in" in the pipe fitters union. I cringed at the sight of them drinking, spitting, rolling blunts, smoking Newports and planning lives they would never live up to. Talking about pretty girls that they would never fuck, talking about working on cars that they would never actually get running. In the morning I would see one of them slinking down the stairwell in his wrinkled work shirt. Stinking of menthol smoke and old english. Fastening on his name tab. " Carl"
Defeated once again by the morning after a night of too much cheap vodka and too many ideas that would never materialize. Maybe I judged them more harshly because they would young white men who in my mind were capable of being so much more.
I guess you can say that I was very aware of what was going on around me at this point. A little too aware. This was the first time I saw life uncensored. I saw what people really did when no one was watching. When there wasn't a god to fear. It was a great distraction from my new life that wasn't working out as I thought it would.
