“I have to tell you something,” she said. “Mawmaw Red died.” She was sobbing, so upset, but I wasn’t sad. I was relieved. Mawmaw’s just gone someplace else now, I thought. My mom remained distraught in the days leading up to the funeral.
Dad came home to attend, and he decided that was a good time to tell her he was leaving her. He’d met someone else. I knew her name was Susan because, well, my mother was screaming about “that whore Susan.” They sent me next door to my grandparents, but I still heard all the screaming and the sounds of plates smashing against walls as my mother went ballistic. Worse, he had brought Susan with him from Alaska, and while he was in town, my mom spotted them and tried to beat the shit out of her.
My mom was so caught up in her understandable grief that she didn’t seem to remember I existed. She was just different, listless and uninterested in doing anything with me. The next thing I knew, the Suburban was backed into the driveway with the hatch up. My dad loaded it up, just like he did all the times we’d moved as a family, only it was just his stuff. I was aware he was leaving, and as my mom screamed at him for the whole neighborhood to hear, I played quietly in the patch of front yard.
When he went in to get one last thing, my mother chased him inside to continue yelling at him. This was my chance. I climbed in the Suburban and hid myself behind some boxes. Nobody noticed I was missing, and it has never occurred to me until I’m right here writing this that he didn’t look for me to say good-bye. He just got in the Suburban, slammed the door, and drove off into his new life.
He got a couple of miles down the road when I decided the coast was clear and I could surprise him.
“Hi!” I said. I thought he would be happy. We were escaping together. Instead, he looked sad and pulled over.
“Baby, you can’t stay,” he said. “I gotta take you home.”
“I don’t wanna go home,” I said. As he did a U-turn, I began to wail, hitting boxes and crying. I just knew home wasn’t safe anymore. I have always had a good sense of things, and everything in me told me that I needed to run.
He had to pull me out of the car, and my mom screamed at both of us. She had to hold me in her grip and drag me into the house to keep me from running after the car. He married Susan, and he started his new life without me.
I didn’t see my father again for almost three years.
My mother instantly became a different person, as if my father’s leaving had triggered an Off switch. She drank Coca-Colas all day, lighting each new cigarette off the one she was just finishing, then stubbing it out in an ashtray or whatever was close. She didn’t care what she looked like, and her hair became gray and got curly, seemingly overnight. Thirty years old and she had to go to work for the first time in her life. She got a waitressing job at a restaurant called Café Lagrange, and then a second job working at Tigator trucking company across the bridge in Port Allen, Louisiana. When the restaurant closed down, she took on more work at Tigator. They had a fleet of blaze-orange eighteen-wheelers, all with a logo of a two-headed animal that was part tiger, part alligator.
She had been a great mom, but now she paid less and less attention to me. Part of it was that she now had to work these minimum-wage jobs, but mostly I think my father just broke her heart. She quickly devolved, and a lot of people wondered if she was doing drugs or drinking. I wish she had been, because her actions would make more sense. I’ve seen my mom drunk maybe five times. On wine coolers at barbecues, places where it’s perfectly appropriate to relax and do that.
My dad left and my mom never cleaned the house or even did dishes again. It was so gross, but it became just how I grew up. I am not a clean freak and I am not OCD. I can do so much damage cluttering up a hotel room in two days, you cannot imagine. But there is a difference between being messy—dumping my suitcase on the floor to find the one thing I cannot find—and being dirty. This was fucking dirty.
At least I could go next door to my grandparents’ house for a little normalcy, but that ended when my grandmother passed away when I was six. My grandfather sold the house as quick as he could and moved to Mississippi. A couple moved in with a little boy named Travis. He was six months younger than me, and we became best friends.
Grandpa sold just in time. My mom and the neighborhood were in a race to see which could go downhill faster. The population of the neighborhood changed just as the crack epidemic hit Baton Rouge. What was once a stable, working-class neighborhood became a real-time loop of Cops. Even the yards gave up. The trees and lawns all died, and cars started getting parked in the yard.
Rats moved in, and their poop was all over the house. They loved the third bedroom, which became a literal junk room. They could have it. The real problem was roaches. They were everywhere in the house and no place was safe. I had a waterbed and I don’t think my mother washed those sheets once after Dad left. The roaches hid in it, waiting for me. I have scars on my legs from where they would bite me.
We had this toothbrush holder, a plastic teddy bear that had holes in his hands and feet to hold two kids’ brushes. When it was new, you could pull a string and the bear’s arms and legs moved as he blinked at you. But my toothbrush had outgrown it, and the teddy bear sat empty on the wall for the roaches to turn into another nest. I’d look in the holes and the roaches would just be in there, their antennae waving at me like, “Fuck you.” It bothered me because I could remember when it was new and clean, when we had Dad around and I had a real mom.
There were many days I came home from school to no electricity. We were always getting shut off for nonpayment. I’d be home alone after school, the house getting darker as the sun got closer to setting. I wasn’t scared, but I was bored and hungry. I’d go out and ride my bike, which wasn’t really safe in the neighborhood, or go hang out at a friend’s house. I had a lot of friends from school and the neighborhood, though in those days I never once had anyone over. “I’ll come to your house,” I’d say. “You guys have better snacks.” Travis next door was always fun to play with. He taught me how to ride a bike, and we took turns with his. Who else was going to teach me?
Travis was great, but he wasn’t a crush or anything like that. Back then I had eyes for Tanya Roberts in 1984’s Sheena. I saw the movie on TV—a sort of female version of Tarzan—and I’ve never forgotten the thrill I felt watching her. She was perfection, a blonde with phenomenal boobs in a torn-up makeshift bikini. Tanya played an orphan raised by an African tribe, who can communicate with animals. What drew me in was that Sheena is as strong as she is pretty. She gets the bad guy by shooting him in the heart with an arrow, then saves the boyfriend and then sends him home to America so she can ride off on a zebra.
The hot girl who saves the day. Who wouldn’t fall for her?
My dad remarried and I guess Susan, who I had still never met, suggested that maybe he should see his daughter. In the three years since I had tried to run away with him, they had moved to Philadelphia. I was six, and my dad wanted me to fly up by myself. There were a lot of screaming phone calls. My mom felt strongly that if he wanted to see me, he should come get me, and this is one of the rare cases where I was on her side. I was not an outgoing kid, so if I was lost or something happened, I would have just decided to live in the airport rather than ask an adult for help.
Susan flew down to Baton Rouge, but on reflection I think my father might have told my mom that he was coming and sent her instead. The last time my mom saw Susan she was dragging her around by the hair, and now she had to hand her daughter over to the woman who ran off with her husband. She referred to Susan as my Wicked Stepmother, and I think it pissed her off even more that Susan was so polite at the airport. We flew to Philadelphia, and I didn’t talk very much until she brought me to my dad. I was so excited to see him.