Laura and I fight sometimes. Or more accurately, I am cruel to her sometimes. I don’t know why. I’ll tell her I don’t really love her and she isn’t good enough for me. I’ll try to think of the meanest thing I can say. “You’re too dumb.” “You’re too simple.” “You’re too sheltered to understand me.” “You’re ugly and you have no taste.” I tell her it’s over between us and I need someone else. I see her tears and feel a blankness wash over me. I see the panic in her eyes. I feel the loss I can inflict on her. It’s like holding my breath, like I don’t know myself because there is no self to know.
I’ll kiss another girl, Tanisha Campbell from English class, my junior high crush, or Erica Nelson, in the weeds behind the football stadium. Word gets back to Laura and she writes me long notes with poems in them, notes that make it clear how much it hurts her to think of me with someone else, and I think “good.” It feels safe to have this power. I don’t know why.
The poems are sad and beautiful, filled with fear and a desire for comfort, images of lost children, sacred ghosts. There’s depth beneath all her earnest girlishness, her braces and self-deprecating jokes, a sense that something made her leave girlhood too soon, that the woman who rushed in to fill the void was assembled in haste, fragmentary, incomplete as if born of the imagination of a girl.
But the thought is abstract in my mind and when I look inside, I feel only numb, as if she never existed, as if we were never captured in that universe in a raindrop, two people who found each other in this lame-ass school beneath the outbound jets.
Then it comes rushing back all at once and presents itself whole: I need her. I can’t live without her. And she suddenly means too much. The amnesia is lifted and I can’t go another day without holding her hand. I have to see her face. She doesn’t deserve this. I am a shit. I am a shit. But the minute I feel the love, I also feel the guilt for having hurt her, having been cruel for no other reason than I couldn’t stand to need her so much.
In the midst of the confusion, I’ll sit on my bed and strum a D chord, mumbling some words over some crappy melody, and before I know it, I’ve started a song. I know it’s bad as I’m singing it. D to G to A, like every song ever written. But it feels good to sing, to be in the Secret Place where I can put the mask down and visit my romantic and stylish friends who feel just as fucked-up as I do.
I do this whenever I am sad or overwhelmed or angry or bored. The songs are not good. The melodies are simple and the lyrics strain, saying too much or too little. It’s nothing I’d ever play for someone else. I’d rather play a Bowie song. The point isn’t to be good at it. The point is the music makes me feel like I belong somewhere, that this person I don’t know, the one who swims beneath his life in a dark, chaotic, unknowable place, this one has a voice too.
CHAPTER 33
THE BIGGEST LIE EVER TOLD
The Snake River Correctional Institution is a new prison in the high desert of eastern Oregon, five miles from the Idaho border. In the summer after my sixteenth birthday, Mom tells me she has a meeting to attend there and I could attend it with her, not the meeting itself, but the car ride. She explains that the car ride with her to this prison in the high desert will be my sixteenth birthday present.
“We can talk about your future and have quality time,” she says. “Just you and me. Isn’t that what you wanted for your birthday?”
I don’t know how to tell her that it isn’t, particularly. Because it seems to mean so much to her. She still sits next to me on the couch and expects me at sixteen years old to hold her hand while we watch TV, our fingers interlaced. When I get up and try to make a joke because I feel uncomfortable, she’ll say something like “I guess I’m just not important to you,” and her face will fall into that hangdog expression of disapproval. “I mean I never get to see you, Mick. Since you moved away.”
There seem to be no good answers. I can either do something that makes me uncomfortable or feel guilty about refusing it. I used to think these invasions were just a kind of cluelessness about people, about boundaries, but I’m starting to think it’s something else.
On the way through the mountainous corridor of the Cascade Mountains created by the Columbia River, driving down I-84, I tell her I’m in love with Laura.
“That’s all just hormones,” she says. “It’s what kids do. They fall in love. If you would’ve stayed in Oregon, you would have met a girl here and fallen in love. Laura sounds like a nice girl but there’s nothing particularly special about her and there are plenty of nice girls in Oregon. You could’ve met one without leaving me.”
The mountains are dusty and brown, dotted with huge boulders on either side of us. It’s so different from the lush green Willamette Valley with all its rain and trees. There’s a kind of silence in the car because I don’t know how to respond, only that she’s wrong about Laura, even though I know I owe her this trip, I owe her my gratitude for my life and for her forgiveness for running out on my job, which was to take care of her.
When we stop for gas, she points at a woman in a tight shoulder-less elastic rainbow top and says, “That woman is too fat for that top.”
“Maybe she’s comfortable,” I say.
“What do you know now that you’re so skinny from all that running?” She pats my stomach, sitting next to me in the car. “That’s probably why you do it.”
“No. I do it because I like to compete and I’ve always loved running.”
“Yeah, but I bet it’s a nice side effect,” she says, shaking her head.
I remember all the times she told me I was fat growing up. It’s strange because one afternoon as we were scanning old pictures in a photo album, when I saw pictures of myself in second, third, and fourth grade, all I saw was a healthy kid with a big overbite. If anything, the child in those photographs looked a little skinny, perhaps malnourished. I wonder why I thought he was fat, why, as a seven-year-old boy, I walked around thinking I’d done something bad and needed to suck my stomach in.
She tells me it’s good that I run because the University of Oregon has a legendary track program and she can’t wait for me to go there so I can be close. “Eugene is a cool town. There are lots of hippies.” I don’t know why she assumes I like hippies. That’s her thing. I don’t know why she thinks I wouldn’t want to consider any other school. “Promise me you’ll go there, so we can be close.”
“Okay, I promise,” I say, to end the conversation.
When we get to the town of Ontario a few miles from the Idaho border, Mom checks us into a motel and leaves for her meeting at the prison. She’s gone all day. I turn on the TV and watch reruns of I Love Lucy until three o’clock when I lace up my sneakers and head out to the highway for a run. The prison is new and they’ve repaved this part of the highway. The new tar stings my nostrils as I plod along with the sound of my muffled steps, jumping sideways when an eighteen-wheeler rumbles past.
It occurs to me that this is an odd birthday present, to be here alone at a prison in eastern Oregon. I think of my tenth birthday, when Paul had just left and it was still just Mom and me in the house on Breys Avenue. We still had the rabbits and it was slaughtering time and because we didn’t want to “let all that good meat go to waste,” we agreed I would do the slaughtering myself. I got out the white bucket and powdered the tree with lye. I picked up the twelve-week-old bunnies from their cages one by one and hit them on the skull with the iron rod, hanging them on the tree to cut off their heads. The hunting knife that Paul left in the barn was too big for me to hold properly, which made me clumsy with it. As I sawed at a rabbit’s neck, I gouged a thick piece of skin right off the middle finger of my left hand. I grabbed it and shook it and tried to suck the blood but figured it would stop soon enough. But then, while slicing the tissue between fur and hide on another rabbit, I cut right through the webbing of my thumb, nearly piercing it completely. I didn’t understand why it was so hard to handle the knife. I thought it would be easy to slaughter these rabbits on my birthday because nothing ever got to me, because I was the one who could do the necessary thing that had to be done. I began to blindly lash and thrust at the carcass until I sliced the skin at the top of my hand and yanked it away and realized there were thick streams of blood running down my fingers and wrist, falling into the bucket where it mingled with the rabbit blood and severed heads.