Literary Crackhouse

I’m stuck in the upper-most corner of the rafters, teetering above a few members of the audience, in what looks from the street to be a crack house. I have issues with heights and bouts of claustrophobic anxiety and I am pretty sure the people below me can see the crack of my ass. My kids are alone, across the street at the KFC—oh, the things I do for my education.

I knew when I saw the room that it would be too small for all of us, my kids and me, to fit in. I didn’t have a plan B, but since I had to attend a literary reading, I knew I needed to form and implement one quickly, or subject the rest of the literary audience to the extreme discomfort of four cranky kids. Outside, I looked around at the corner of University Avenue and Utah Street, but all I saw were smoke shops and tattoo parlors, giving me an even bigger sense of worry. Then, like a lighthouse in a sea of fog, there stood the Kentucky Fried Chicken. I mentally tabulated the amount of cash in my wallet and Plan B was ready to be put into motion.

I left the kids sitting in a booth, with a stack of ones, some quarters, and instructions to “stay here!” The girls, 18 and 16, were used to babysitting their nine-year-old brothers, but not quite under these circumstances. The boys’ biggest problem was not that I was leaving them alone in a fast food restaurant but that they had never before eaten at a place like KFC, and they weren’t sure they’d like the greasy food. The irony of the situation tarnishes my halo of parental perfection.

Back at the crack house, the room is filling up. The seats have all been taken, and I am directed to the upper level of the room—and I use that term loosely. The upper level looks to me to be a reformed attic. Anyone over 5’6” would have to stoop. The walls of the attic have been torn away on one side, exposing the space below. I move to sit in a spot in the furthest most corner of this former attic, under the sloping roof. My seat is a makeshift piece of overhang consisting of a few dusty slats of wood. Luckily for me, I am short. Less luckily for me, I don’t fit into small corners like I used to.

Next to me is a small stereo set, the wires falling through the slats of wood and drawing my eyes downward to the unlucky people who, should they glance up, will undoubtedly see the mounds of tattooed flesh hanging over the waistband of my jeans. There is also a high school yearbook here, crowding the corner further and adding to the number of things that could possibly fall onto the people below me: the yearbook, the stereo, and me.

The room looks as if it has been condemned for demolition. But this seems oddly appropriate for a literary reading. The walls are unfinished, except for the blank white sheet of drywall screwed into the wall behind the podium. A freshly-fabricated, improvised bookcase takes up a corner, its newness standing out in the dust. Above me, ceiling pipes are exposed in several human-sized chunks, and I wonder if I will see any rodents wandering through. I notice the spider webs above and next to me, as I simultaneously feel the breeze on my exposed lower back, and I wonder what species of arachnid will be dining on my hide this evening. I attempt to relay the hilarity of the situation to the much-younger college student who is seated on the other side of the
yearbook and stereo, but she looks more trapped by my presence than I am by the sloping, dusty ceiling.

When the guest speaker begins, I am transported from this piece of wood in the upper-most corner of a literary crack house into his tale of academic adventure on the east coast. When he mentions a translucent scorpion, however, I wriggle back to reality, praying that no scorpions live in the walls behind me. The speaker continues with the story of an outhouse in Greece; a few moments later, the audience is treated to the sound of rushing water through the exposed ceiling pipes as someone flushes a toilet next door.

In between the sound in the pipes and the music of the prose, I am reminded why I’m here. I hear encouragement between the lines of poetry. And I know that, no matter the obstacle, I will someday be the speaker in front of a roomful of listeners.

After the reading is over, I make my way down from the attic and say a quick hello and goodbye to my classmates. I rush across the street to KFC and find Alexa, Kendall, Dane and Jared seated exactly where I left them. They have their own adventurous tales to tell of their leeriness at being left in such a sketchy environment, and the kinds of people who visited the restaurant during the hour of my absence.

During the ride home, they tell me of the guy who rushed into KFC to refill his Wendy’s cup with soda. They tell me of the guy seated next to them who spent the entire hour nibbling every morsel of meat off the bones of his pile of chicken. Somewhere along I-5, the subject changes to a website that has nothing but pictures of the people who shop at Walmart. Seems there is a picture of a guy that looks like a human condom.

“What’s a condom?” says Jared.

The girls look to me for answers, but I have none. After this night, don’t they realize I am making this up as I go along?

Statement of Purpose

“The Statement of Purpose is the single most important part of your application that will tell the admissions committee who you are, what has influenced your career path so far, your professional interests and where you plan to go from here” statementofpurpose.com.

I humbly submit my application to you, oh wise and illustrious graduate school admissions committee members, in hopes that you will pick me, Syndee Wood, to be one of the chosen few. I know that, once I tell you how great I am, you will see that there really is no other choice. You will probably send an email to me before the promised date, out of the excitement you will surely have at the idea of having me, Syndee Wood, in your program.
And so I begin my tale of greatness.

Who I am

I am a mother of four amazing children. You have not heard of them yet, but someday their names will be known in every household, and you will remember that it was me who gave birth to them. All of them. And since they were virginal births, I give no kudos to anyone other than myself, and God, for creating them in their perfection. Since their miraculous entrances, I have strived to show them, through my example, how to be a more perfect human being, and how to leave the earth with the greatest impact, but the smallest carbon footprint.

What Has Influenced My Career Path

It was during my marriage that I realized what I wanted to do with my gifts. I give the credit to my ex-husband. His desire to include me in his journey toward his Bachelor’s degree in molecular cell biology showed me the importance of having people like me in the teaching position. His insistence on repeating for me every single lesson, no genetic or chemical detail left unsketched, convinced me that I was needed out there, in the classroom, if not just to spare the biology spouses from death by monotony. Yes, teaching in a college classroom is more than just my dream; it is my destiny and could save the world.

My Professional and Educational Interests

Once I knew of my future, I had no choice but to reach for it. And so I have spent the last twelve years of my life trying to make you people happy. Writing papers, researching dead white guys, having it pounded into my head that post-modernism is not a theory: do you think I would have done this on my own? No. I was a perfectly good writer and teacher before your professors came along, but I jumped through all of your proverbial hoops in an effort to show you, the powers that be, how dedicated I am to achieving my goal of perfecting the world, one classroom at a time.

Where I Am Going From Here

In conclusion, I plan to submit this application and go have a much deserved drink. In fact, make it a double. I have spent more time on this blessed application process than I have on my classes. Do you see the irony here? I will probably be bumped off the magna cum laude list after graduation simply because I spent so much time working on this essay and this application that my grades fell. I hope you are happy. I hope you appreciate what I have done for you. And I hope you pick me, Syndee Wood, to be a humble but deserved part of your graduate program.

Addiction and Family

The Beginning. The End.

I remember my mom in the kitchen. Cooking in the kitchen. Sometimes she was watering the plants, but usually she was in the impeccable kitchen. I’d come home from school to the scent of something delicious on the stove and Shotgun Tom on the radio. She’d be standing at the sink—barefoot; tanned, shapely legs; short shorts; hips swinging to the beat of Chubby Checker or The Teenagers; tanned back exposed through the long, curly hair that covered the back of her triangular, crocheted halter top—as she washed the dishes and prepared dinner for our family.

I remember my mom with the trash. Sifting through the trash. Sometimes she was in the dumpster, but usually she was sifting through the heaps of trash. I’d come home from school to the metallic scent of discardings and the rustle of plastic bags. She’d be sitting on the floor—dirty feet, fresh track marks on her pasty legs, scabbed arms hidden under long sleeves, scabbed and scarred face exposed under her dirty, unbrushed hair—as she urgently categorized the garbage from the neighborhood into piles according to resale worth.

I’ve spent my life wondering what made my parents so susceptible to addiction. What makes two people give up their belongings, vacations, home, family, and children in exchange for a needle in a vein? What makes these same two people so desperate for money they become coyotes? My parents spent years smuggling illegal aliens across the Mexican border and into Los Angeles, until finally, one of them was busted and spent months in federal prison.

This is my attempt at an understanding.

I am lucky. I know that if I had learned of their addiction just a few years earlier, I might not have known that it wasn’t me that drove them to it. A 14-year-old me might have processed their choice as a result of my behavior, and I might have turned on myself, spending my life punishing myself for the demon I thought I was. But I am lucky. Rather than a life of self-infliction, I have lived a quest for love, clinging to the hope that someone, anyone would give me the love my parents should have.

My mom’s dad died a painful, lingering death—cancer of the voice box—when I was two. I am told becoming my Papa made him nice. But I did not know him long enough to remember him. I must rely on the remnants of stories and hints from Mom to cast light into the shadows of her life.

I see him taunting her. His face construed in anger as he belittles her, using her small size to physically control her, the stench of whiskey invading her as he breathes his venom into her face. Today, when my dad plays drunk games of hand-shaking strength with equally drunk male family members, my mom shrinks from the room, whispers to me, “my dad used to do that.”
Maybe he liked hurting things, torturing animals and forcing her to watch until they were dead. Today, when the grandkids go fishing, she is reduced to tears at the sight of a fish in a bucket, gasping for breath, and she can admit only that her dad used to fish and it has always upset her to see the fish suffering.

I know he abused them. I see him holding his wife’s hair in his fist, knife to her throat as he leans her back in the kitchen chair and forces her to call my teenage mother into the room. It’s time to say goodbye. This time he’s really gonna do it, she is told. He has had enough and this time will be the last time he has to put up with it. If he had done it, if he had killed my beloved Nanny that day, maybe Mom would’ve gotten the help she needed, and would never have turned to heroin and methamphetamine to numb the pain.

Instead, she married Scott. He was a bigger, angrier, Marine-version of my grandfather, and I am very familiar with the abuse he heaped on her. On us. For seven years he slapped, kicked, twisted, and burned into the depths of my mom the self-loathing her dad had begun. Scott’s abuse toward his kids fell into the verbal category.

When I was little, I had long, thick, brown hair. Mom put it in a ponytail every day, and my hair drew compliments everywhere we went. One of the compliments I heard most often was, “Your hair is so thick it looks like a horse’s tail!” When I reported this one day to Scott, his response was, “You know what that makes your face, don’t you?” Seven year old Syndee understood immediately that she looked like the ugly, black, wrinkled place just under the horse’s tail. In a sentence, Scott shaped a child’s identity for life. He was like that. But I am lucky. He only hurt me with words. I remember the joy I felt the day I found out that Scott and my mom were

getting a divorce. I was eight.

One Mother’s Day, Mom went on a date with Robert, a friend from high school, and within a week our families merged into one cramped but happy home. I gained two brothers who protected me like I never knew I always wanted. Robert became my dad, although I never call him “Dad.” I refer to him as “my dad” to others, but when we speak to each other, he is and always will be, “Robert.”

My sisters and I still saw Scott, mostly on the holidays, until he got engaged again—then only my sisters saw him. Seems I look a little too much like my mother, and his new wife was a little jealous, and, well, since I was such a smart girl, and he wasn’t really my dad anyway, I understood, didn’t I? But I was the lucky one, because my little sisters had to go live with him, and his abuse, after Child Protective Services took them away.

What’s in a name?

I was born on August 28, 1969—ten days after Woodstock. This is pertinent information if you have the need to know anything about me. The era I was born in, as well as the spelling of my name, has created me as much as living with addicts.

Mom was eighteen when I was born. Dad was a drummer in a band, married to someone else, with another family, other children; he had no time for a teenage fan he happened to get knocked up. So it was Mom and me. Being only eighteen in the latter part of the 60s, Mom felt it necessary to tweak her baby’s name. And so I was christened Syndee Marie King by a mother who may or may not have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug throughout her pregnancy. I took up residence in an era when young parents rebelled with the names of their children as much as they did with closed fists and burned bras.

As I grew up and noticed the other names of children, I felt grateful that my name was only spelled wrong—other names were just plain wrong. A girl in my ninth grade Algebra class was named Sundae, as in ice cream with whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry on top. Mystikle Rayne was in my graduating class too. The newly-launched pop culture icon Mtv featured v-jay Dweezil Zappa. Videos by his sister, Moon Unit ranked high in popularity. Of course, rock stars took the child-naming craze to new levels. The one that disturbed me to the core was Grace Slick and her son named god. As if the small g made it okay. Poor kid grew up and changed his name to John, as the legend goes. I was lucky. My name was only spelled wrong.

When Mom married Scott, he changed my last name to Cadwallader. Well, not legally, of course; he had no intention of adopting me, a child who was born with an IQ higher than his ever would be. And so I went to school armed with my wit, intelligence and my names.

I was always surprised when teachers couldn’t pronounce my name. Seven year old Syndee was

perplexed that college graduates with twenty years of teaching kids how to read couldn’t seem to string together the four syllables that made up my last name. Cad wall a der, it’s not that difficult! And if the last name was tough, the first name was impossible. These professionals who intended to teach me that y is often used as a vowel in the English language could not figure out how to place the vowel between two consonants in a proper manner. Syndee became Sydnee, Synder, Sign-dee, and my favorite, Snydee. Parents named their children crazy things in the 60s, this was true, but who would name their child Snydee?

As a result of this confusion over my names, I grew up with a belief and attitude that I was smarter than the teachers, and that I could do a better job. By fourth grade, I knew what to expect on the first day of school when the teacher got to the Cs. I’d give them a chance to get it right, marvel at their idiocy when they couldn’t get it right, and eventually butt in with a haughty but correct pronunciation. It wasn’t until college that any teacher ever got it right. Apparently, they don’t teach proper use and pronunciation of the English language until graduate school.

In addition to the desire to teach so that at least somebody would be teaching the next generation how to speak our language, I grew up with a need to respond quickly to inquiries about my name, or face a lifetime of giving the same boring answers to the same ridiculous questions. Since I’ve worked retail for most of my life, wearing a name tag has helped inspire both the queries and the quips.

Some of my favorites are:
Customer says, “Is your name Cindy? Wow, that a weird way to spell it.” I say, with a shit-eating grin and a sarcastic tone, “Well, thank you!”

Customer says, “What nationality were your parents? “ I say, “American hippie.”

Customer says, “Well that sure is an interesting way to spell Cindy.” I say, “Well I’m an interesting kind of Syndee.” This one wins as this customer came back and asked me out.

I have often wondered if the fact that my name houses the word “syn,” albeit misspelled, has influenced my take on God and religion, or if that is an innate characteristic of me. Perhaps by the end of this book, I will have the answer to that lingering question. Either way, my name has been an influence on my personality and my existence. Just another subject to discuss on the couch in the shrink’s office

Not like every other Christmas

It was Christmas Eve, 1986. I was seventeen and working at HoneyBaked Hams, just a few miles from my house. Working there was my first experience with hard work, and I liked it. At that point in the work day, I was stocking hams ranging in size from 6 pounds to 22 pounds. For a 17 year old girl weighing in at just over 90 pounds, it was a difficult job, but I took great pride in it.

It was loud inside the refrigerator, but I was grateful to not be taking phone orders, so I basked in the cold and the solitude and the sound of the 34 degree breeze that kept the hams cold. The insulated HoneyBaked coat I wore was as long as a dress. The sleeves hung to my knees and the HoneyBaked gloves were twice the size of my hands. Somewhere around age six, I had stopped letting my size be an excuse, so I scrunched everything up small enough to fit me, took foil-wrapped hams from the back wall of the cooler and slammed them into the glass display case. From behind the glass doors, I could see the backs of the employees at their registers, and, as they opened and closed the doors, I could hear the impatient customers, anxious to get their holiday started. The Christmas Eve bustle meant the hams left the case faster than I could fill it, so, every once in a while, an employee would open a door, drop the corporate façade, and yell for a specific sized ham. I felt at ease in the chaos. It was just like home.

Home. Chaos. Two words that described the seven person family I was part of. Even so, Christmas Eve of 1986 was unlike the others we had had together. My step-brothers had gone to live with their mother sometime before. The fighting between them and our parents had gotten to be too much to handle. At least that’s what I thought then.

Although only 24 hours remained until Christmas, we had no tree, no stockings, no lights and no promise of any of the usual festivities. I don’t remember feeling anything about this fact at the time, and, as I reflect, it seems pretty normal for our non-traditional family; we kids had decorated the tree on many a Christmas Eve while our parents shopped until well past midnight. Then they would lock themselves in their bedroom and wrap while we slept, and we would inevitably wake up to a living room full of presents.

As I sang Christmas songs to myself in the cooler, someone opened the back door and yelled to me that I had a phone call. I removed my too-big coat and gloves and mentally prepared myself for what I thought would be a frustrated customer. Instead, it was my sister. She and our other sister were alone at home, but they knew I was coming home soon. Now I was the frustrated one; she was calling me even though she knew I was busy.

“I just thought I’d let you know that we’re leaving,” she said. “We just found out that Mom and Robert are doing heroin.”

What? I didn’t understand what she was saying. Heroin?

She continued. “That’s why we don’t have a tree. And we aren’t getting one either. We’re going to Dad’s. Do you want to come?”

Heroin? I thought. What?

The next few moments are gone from my memory. I remember only how my stomach felt: like a wave machine pushing, pushing, pushing my lunch around inside of me. And how my throat felt: like I had swallowed a hot rock.

I must’ve told my sister that I was going to finish my shift. Of course I wouldn’t have been going to Scott’s house, he’d made that much clear. I do remember telling my boss something had happened in my family and I needed a break. I walked the area behind the store; the trees behind me seemed like a place I wanted to disappear into. Instead, I sat in view of the store but as far away from people as I could, and I began to cry. It all made sense now. No tree, no stockings, no brothers, no Christmas. But more pieces began to fit into the puzzle, like the occasional day without electricity, without cable, without food. I understood now why our stuff had begun to disappear. Our vacations to the desert had stopped sometime back, and now our motorcycles were gone, our camper, even our tv. They said the tv got stolen while we slept. I remembered the day we got the tv, a surprise from Mom and Robert. It even had a wireless remote, and, that night, we had all gathered around it to watch some show like “The Dukes of Hazard.” I sobbed harder, choking on my tears as I realized how long before that Christmas Eve our family had died, and finally understanding the reason.

Driving Lesson

Now here is a story. I’m fifteen. I have my car, a Volkswagen Bug, 1969. There remains some debate as to where the car came from, and how much it really cost since my parents don’t actually remember the interaction, or what other products might have been traded for the car. But I don’t care, I just need to learn how to drive it, get my license, then it’s mine.

Robert’s giving me my first driving lesson in my car. It’s a stick. The last time my step-dad gave me a driving lesson was on a Kawasaki KX80, at Superstition Mountain. That day, he sat on the back, gunned the throttle, and jumped off the back of the bike while I careened toward the sand dune. I was ten. Today, I am wiser to his ways, so I’m prepared when he tells me from the passenger seat, “Okay, drive.”

We drive to 7-11, me rolling through the right turn on a red light because I can’t work the clutch and the brake at the same time. I am reminded of that first driving lesson when I shift gears and I wonder to myself if I should’ve been using the clutch on the motorcycle when I shifted from first to second. No matter, we’re at 7-11 now, and he is buying me Snickers, Chick-0-Sticks and Abba Zabbas, rewarding me for putting him in a potentially deadly situation. He suggests we stop at his friend’s house, just around the corner from 7-11. Everyone thinks Al is nice, but I don’t like him. Something about him. More destinations mean more driving though, which I am all for.

Al’s house feels weird when I walk through it, but fifteen year old me doesn’t yet know to leave when something feels weird. There is a garage in the back that seems to be Robert and Al’s destination, so I follow, bag of candy in hand. Two pit bulls come toward me, I smile at them and say hello. I pay no attention to my dad as he jokingly tells the dogs to “sic em.” He does this with our dogs all the time and thinks he’s hilarious, but I’m over it.

In a blur, I am face down on the ground. Something stabs me in the back. Where is my candy? Pain shoots through my leg this time, much sharper and deeper this time. I scream out “Fuck!” and immediately worry that I’m going to get in trouble. I can’t get up, something is on me. Somebody’s hands lift me and throw me against a stucco wall. My dad is standing in front of me, facing the other way, crouched down in an umpire position. He growls, “Come on! Come the fuck on!” I hear one of the dogs whimper. From the safe spot behind Robert’s legs I can see eight dog legs, but now they seem too scared to lunge at me. I am crying. My back hurts, my leg hurts, my heart feels loud in my ears, I can’t hold my own weight.

I see Al, dog collars in his fists, as he leads them to the garage. Robert turns to me and asks if I am okay. But I don’t know. We see that I have a bite on my back and a deeper bite on my butt. I am crying again, still. My favorite pants ripped, bloody, ruined. And what about gymnastics tryouts tomorrow?

Robert takes me out to my car, this time he gets in the driver’s seat. He tells me that my mom will only freak out if she hears about this, so we should just go straight to the hospital. No no, I tell him, she would never forgive us if we told her after the fact, and besides, she will worry if we stay gone for three more hours without explanation. But he was right, she freaks out. I turn the hysterics over to her. It’s her job. Mom will take care of it, so I can relax.

At the emergency room, two other patients have arrived before me, one comes in later. Mom and Robert become mad when the person who came after me gets to see the doctor first, but I don’t mind. It’s not hard to see that she is having trouble breathing, while I am just bleeding from a hole in my butt. She can go first.

Now I lie face down on a hospital bed. How embarrassing, these people are standing around looking at my butt. Thank God they place a sheet over me when they stitch me up, but how the hell am I going to tell everyone at school that I got stitches in my ass? And what about gymnastics tryouts tomorrow?

The doctor gives me some white pills; they will take care of the pain he tells me. I will find out they are antibiotics, not codeine, after I hand them out to my friends—who now call me Dimples—on Friday night and ask the doctor for more at my next visit. No wonder we didn’t feel anything.

In the years since this happened, I have learned that Al was a pretty notorious dealer in the town. The pit bulls that attacked me were mother and son, the younger one doing the most damage to my body. That same dog attacked another girl, who looked eerily like me, and put her into an emergency surgery that included melting her skin together in an attempt to stop the bleeding. She ended up with hundreds of stitches and more than a year on crutches. Her gymnastics career ended that day. I am lucky.

They’re gonna do it anyways

Being the children of addicts had its perks. Before it got really bad, it was really fun. My parents had always been liberal parents, which meant we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. When it came to us kids, my parents’ motto was: they’re gonna do it anyways. They expected us to cuss, drink, smoke, and have sex, so we did. And we did much of it with their help. Our parents provided our birthday parties with alcohol. They told us to come to them for pot, so they could make sure we got the good stuff. My dad even went to my first boyfriend and asked him if I should go on the pill. With all that encouragement and without fail, we made the decisions we were expected to make.

It was the summer of seventh grade that I first tried pot. I was eleven. Dawna Hollingsworth was my best friend, mentor, and idol. From Dawna I learned about music, marijuana and metaphors. We’d hide in her bedroom, smoking stems of trash weed that we called pot, listening to AC/DC, and practicing the fine art of insults. “You’re such a Nigel,” Dawna said one humid afternoon. A what? I had always thought Nigel was a name, like in that song, the one where he has his future in a British steel. But to Dawna, the name was a rock that she wielded with power-hungry eyes before hurling it at my head. I ducked. “I am NOT!” I may not have known what a Nigel was, but I most certainly did not want to be one.

Dawna’s mother had once been my dad’s girlfriend. We figured this out the first time Dawna met my parents. Hollingsworth is not a common name, so my dad mentioned his former girlfriend Bobbi (Or Billi, or something with a B). “Yeah, that’s my mom,” Dawna said. Oh God. Once the image of my dad doing it with Dawna’s mother dissipated from my mind, I realized that parents the age of my parents were all kind of alike. They were less like the parents in a Judy Blume story, and more like the people on the pages of Easy Rider magazine. And they spelled their kids’ names wrong.

The Hollingsworth household had people coming in and out as if the place was a restaurant and the front door said “In” while the back door said “Out.” The constant coming and going of people in her house meant that Dawna and I could get away with more than even my parents would let us do. Since the role models on either side of us were all smokers, in one way or another, we felt encouraged to be normal and smoke pot, too. I remember sitting on her roof, trying to roll a joint with a dried stick that may or may not have been the stem of a marijuana plant. I think she had found her mom’s discardings, and we, not knowing the difference, thought we were stealing and smoking some good shit. Once, she convinced me to inhale smoke from her fireplace through a rolled up piece of newspaper. I did, because I thought she had too. That was also the summer I learned not to be a follower.

Summer ended and Dawna and I lost touch. I think her mom sent her to live with her dad for a while. I’m not sure if she went so her dad could straighten Dawna out, or so Dawna’s mom could straighten herself out. Either way, I didn’t see her again until we were 17 or so. She had a purple Mohawk, piercings, and very few articles of clothing. I guess it didn’t work out with Dad.

After that summer, when I’d sometimes babysit for friends of my parents, they knew they didn’t have to pay me in cash. They’d get home from a night of drinking, or swinging, or whatever it was they did, and I’d pretend like I wasn’t reading their Penthouse Forum magazines that they left on their coffee table. They’d stumble through their wallets or purses and find they didn’t have enough cash to pay me, so they’d pick up the phone and call my parents.

“Hi Patee,” the wife would say to my mom. “It’s Michelle. Listen, we don’t have enough cash to pay Syndee, so can we just give her a dime bag?


Who is this?

I bring the photo album into the living room, hand it to my sister and tell her to pass it around to the rest of the family. The album was the result of a summer spent organizing and arranging, in hopes of producing an afternoon of laughing. Inside its blue canvas covers are the remains of the pictures and mementos of my life. Three-year-old Syndee holding a baby doll, smiling for the camera, while Mommy takes care of the real baby. Six-year-old Syndee, a stick with skin really, teetering upside down in a crooked handstand. Ten-year-old Syndee with hair past her waist and ultra cool feathered bangs. And teenage Syndee. Bad, bad teenage Syndee.

Mom and Robert ask: “Who’s this with you in this one?” I’m expecting to have to explain the joint in my hand, or the guy I am draped over. Instead, I turn to see them pondering a picture of Mom and me.

“Ha-ha,” I say. “Very funny.” I mean, I realize it was a long time ago, but she isn’t all that unrecognizable.

“Who is it?” they ask, looking honestly but playfully perplexed.

“That’s you, Mom.” The playful looks fall off their faces, and we all look back at the picture.
I remember the day the picture was taken. It was Christmas, at Grama Mavis’s house. By my white earrings, orange t-shirt (neatly knotted at the waist) and bright blue pants, I can tell the year is 1988, which makes it a year and a day after I found out. The picture has twenty years of bulletin board display holes in it. My clothes are wrinkle-free in the picture—it must’ve been one of the short periods of time we had electricity. Mom is clean, on the outside.

They tell me I’m crazy, there is no way that is my mom. It is her, I tell them, wouldn’t I know my own mom? The questions begin: Am I sure it’s her? Did she really look that bad? What else do I remember about that day? Who was there?

It occurs to me that this is how much of their life is since they got clean on the inside. There is proof in front of them that they were there physically; mentally, emotionally, they were swimming through the abyss. I am at once sympathetic and angry. How sad to have to learn about their life through others, to have few memories that aren’t glazed by the effects of the drug. But why did they need a coping mechanism to make it through a Christmas day with their five kids? Was I really so bad that my parents needed heroin to escape?

These questions hang in the air as each of us reviews the pictures in our heads of the day, the year, the life. Some of us choose to stay there, blaming the early life for the current life. Some of us try to bury it, another form of escape.

A Memory. A Dream.

She is alone. Watching from the darkened room. The people in the light are loud. She wants to go to sleep. Maybe she is drunk. Still high from the party. Maybe she is dreaming. Maybe she is sober and has been awakened by this party. Her parents’ party. Her mind will never let her access this part of the memory. What she does remember happened later. The house is dark. Quiet now. Something hurts. Something heavy is holding her down in the dream and pulling her out of it too. The party is over but someone’s breathing is close. Inside her, something hurts. From the dream she emerges and is in the darkened room again. Someone is on top of her. Someone is having sex with her. She can’t see his face. She can only feel him pushing into her. She can only hear him grunt. Something wet hits her cheek. He pushes harder. The dream returns and she is spared the rest of the memory. The drunken-drug-trauma induced darkness takes her back to the place where mommies protect their babies and bad things don’t happen.