I am in the backseat, eating a piece of beef jerky packed by Grandpa. No one knows where we are. Mom has made sure of that.
There are pine trees that rise up over the forest like spearheads jutting out of the earth. At one point, Mom says that we are about to cross the California border into Oregon and I’m glad the mountains are so tall because maybe it means it’ll be harder for anyone to get to us.
Mom keeps saying how much better Oregon will be. How safe it is. How clean. That you can breathe there because there are fewer people and cars and less smog and trees everywhere. She tells us she has a new job at the state mental hospital in Salem, that we’ll have enough money for food and clothes and a place to live because “everything in Oregon costs less than California so you don’t have to kill yourself just to eat and pay the rent.”
Her new job is helping men getting out of prison to not do drugs. She’s an expert at that since that’s what happened to Dad.
She knows all about addiction which is a disease you get in the brain and also in the heart. Whole families get it too and you don’t just get over it by stopping the drugs. Everyone in the family has it whether they are the ones using the drugs or not. You have to have a higher power and go to meetings and say prayers and admit you’re powerless. Mom knows this because that’s all anyone talked about in Synanon and even before that she read so many books at Berkeley.
I don’t understand how I could have a disease when I’m only five years old. Also we weren’t part of a family at the School like an orphanage and the smell of Grandma’s Dutch makes me sick to my stomach.
I don’t think Dad needed any of this. He’s tough and everyone in Synanon said how funny he was and how much he helped them. “Your dad is one funny sumbitch,” people were always saying. “And he saved my ass. No one’s seen more life than your dad and so you couldn’t bullshit with him. You can’t con a con man.”
Mom gets sad if we talk about Dad and you can’t talk to her when her face goes blank and her eyes go far away and she’s in the deep-russian.
I think maybe sadness runs in families too and since we’re in the same family, we feel her sadness too. We share it like our Dutch cheeks and corn-silk hair. We know that Dad is somewhere else in the world and I wonder if he’s laughing right now or helping someone not be a Dope Fiend or riding his motorcycle on a different highway while we’re here in this car in the mountains with Mom going to some place called Oregon.
I remember how I used to sit in Bonnie’s lap during story time every night. I know she wasn’t a mom because everyone told me a mom is someone who gives you birth and she didn’t do that. Also Mom tells me I will always be hers and that’s what a mom is. But still I miss Bonnie because she used to hug me and play little games and take me out on days when she wasn’t even working in the School. She worked the Cube, which meant she worked for a week then was off for a week, and she’d even come in on her days off to take me hiking or read me a story before bed.
Bonnie says she wanted to be a teacher but then when she got to Synanon they told her they had a school and she knew that’s where she belonged, with the kids. Everyone had different jobs. Dad ran the auto shop. Some people cooked food, some cleaned up, some even sold things like pens and cups to businesses with their name printed right on the pen.
I was in the Orange Room with all the other little kids and Tony was in the Green Room with the bigger kids and Bonnie is always there in my memory. I can’t remember a time she wasn’t sitting by me in the Commons, where we ate lunch, or playing hot hands with me on the playground. Is that a mom? Someone who you can’t ever remember not loving you?
When the parents came to visit, someone would always say, “Here come the Headsuckers. Be careful you don’t give those kids pointy heads!” We didn’t know what that meant, but one day Clubby told me not to listen because it was just Chuck being mean and it’s good for parents to want to hug and kiss their kids even if Chuck thinks it’s bad.
Mom says Chuck wanted to make “a new type of person who didn’t need parents and could just rely on themselves,” and that’s why we couldn’t see our parents, so we could become these new people. I don’t feel new. I think we’re just normal and I miss Bonnie and I don’t want to have to hide on the other side of these mountains.
Mom has one friend in Salem, a woman who helped her get the job helping prisoners not be Dope Fiends. The woman is the only person in the world who knows where we are. That way we’re safe. Mom says when we get there, we’ll make new friends too and that life is going to be different in Oregon. It’s going to be the Three Musketeers—Mom and Tony and me—versus the whole world. We are going to be happy now and she deserves it after what she’s been through. Synanon just went crazy when they started to force the men to have those vast-ectomies and started beating everyone up so she decided to leave and even though Phil got beaten up and even though we’re hiding in this car hundreds of miles away, it’s easy to imagine because anything seems possible when you’re up in the mountains surrounded by trees and rivers and endless skies so we start singing songs:
He’s got the whole world in his hands,
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
I picture two hands as big as mountains cradling the world like a bowl with everything in it: all the plants and animals and trees and people and buildings with giant ghostlike fingers stretching around it. Tony and I name the things we see out the window, placing them in the song, singing at the top of our lungs:
He’s got the mountains and the trees in his hands,
He’s got the mountains and the trees in his hands,
He’s got the mountains and the trees in his hands,
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
He’s got a broken-down truck in his hands,
He’s got a broken-down truck in his hands,
He’s got a broken-down truck in his hands,
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
And it feels like maybe Oregon will be something new, something better. We’re all singing and Grandpa made us lunches to eat: ham sandwiches with cheese and mustard on rolls with beef jerky. It’s salty and sweet and I even get an Orange Crush soda which I’ve never had, because we aren’t allowed to eat sugar. Mom says sugar is a drug and it’ll kill you just the same as alcohol, which is why no one in Synanon was allowed to eat sugar so we usually have water or milk or an apple or yogurt for a treat but since it’s not every day that you move to a whole new state, she lets us drink the Orange Crush.
The window is down and I’m drinking pop and we’re all doing a silly dance where we move our shoulders up and down and back and forth in our seats there in the mountains that separate Oregon from the bad men and the bad things in Berkeley. Then Tony sings,
He’s got the mommies and the daddies in his hands,
He’s got the mommies and the daddies in his hands.
Mom stops singing and stares out the window with her hands gripping the steering wheel. She stays silent for a long time. I give Tony a punch on the shoulder from the seat behind him. “What?! I was just singing.”
“I know you were, sweetie,” Mom says. “It’s all right.” Tony turns around and gives me the look he gives when he wants me to know he’s going to get me later, which he always does, pinning me to the ground with his knees and pounding on my chest while I scream.