Aw Shit, I shouldn't have answered the phone

So I’m sitting watching Cadillac Records with Leslie and my mom calls. I’ve also just painted my fingernails purple. I had to file them down because I scratched my face like a baby, and they’re still wet. I'm holding the phone precariously to my ear.
I answer cheerfully, as I always do and tell her what I'm doing, and she says, this’ll be quick. Of course it will because I just told you I’m watching a movie and poisoning myself inhaling paint fumes (which isn’t as bad as people say). She asks “do you know what I was doing 23 years ago today? Getting high.”

I thought, that’s funny, I just got high too. Then she asked what she was doing 23 years ago tomorrow- not getting high. I was thinking, where’s my pot? “And,” she continued, “and it was all because of my baby.” That baby would be me and that’s not a kid’s responsibility. I told her well, congratulations.

In addition to being drunks, my mother also likey-ed the cocaine. I guess it was called crack if that’s still the same as freebasing, but since we were in a different tax bracket and she actually bought powder and cooked it up herself, I guess we’re safe on the freebasing. She worked for Amtrak and ran the line from Chicago to NY to LA and San Francisco. They partied on those trains like it was actually 1999, so she got all the best drugs (and records) from all over the country.

I remember walking into the kitchen one day and it’s covered in all kinds of bowls, butane, what looked like metal medical supplies and shit I’d never seen in the fucking kitchen before. Besides the fact my mom was the worst cook ever and when trying to make me biscuits invented “breakfast cookies”, so much seeming activity in the kitchen surprised me. I asked what all this stuff was and she said, “Something I don’t ever want you to do”. Well, that was clear I knew she smoked pot, but I assumed everyone smoked pot. She smoked pot with her dad, so why would I think it’s strange. And she drank, but everybody drank. I didn’t see anything wrong with the way we lived. . I didn’t really understand about the drugs until she went into rehab.

23 years ago today I suppose. I do remember it was the end of school. The sixth grade. It had been a tough year for everybody and I was one worn out 12 year old. My mother had abandoned me in France. I don’t mean she left me to fend for myself in the French/ Swiss Alps, but she didn’t send me any letters or call. No one in my family did. It was so bad they called my house so I could talk to someone and no one was home. I wrote every day at first, then every other day, and then I just stopped. Later she told me, all fucked up, that she’d sent me a huge care package with all of the newspapers of the important events I’d missed in the mountains. Like, the Bears winning the Super Bowl and Challenger blowing up. She also sent some Championship t-shirts and hats, she said.

Then, my Granny had died. She’d been sick while I was gone and my Granddad says that she waited for me to get home safely before she died. I wasn’t home two weeks. I was on some Brownie trip that day. It was Presidents Day. Michelle had on too much of her mom’s perfume. (I don’t know the name of it, but whenever I get a sniff of it in my nose I think of this time and want to throw up.) Granddad had dropped me off for it before he headed to the hospital because my mom was M.I.A, California run. I’d barely seen her since I got home. I was staying upstairs with my other Grandma, Granny’s daughter, and my Aunt Donna. Uncle Sidney was around but he was so strung out and evil I didn’t miss him. And Uncle Torry was sitting around smoking cigarettes and looking maudlin as usual. Aunt Donna was also on a tear and Grandma was waist deep in Crown Royal and black assed days.

From February through June it was just Granddad and me. He was about 76 then and still took me everywhere I needed to go. I got cookbooks to learn how to take care of us. Even though everybody was around, except of course for my mom, nobody was really there.
In March I got my period and didn’t have anyone to go through the talk with me or go get me pads or rejoice in my becoming a woman. So I scavenged through my mom’s stuff and found this long pad that needed a belt and stuffed it in my panties. Luckily that first one was only a little spotting and only lasted a day.

At school it was tough too. I was awkward and too smart and my boobs were getting gigantic. I was also becoming chubbier because I was trying to feed my grandpa and myself and didn’t know what I was doing. And my Grandma was dead and no one would talk to me about it. I was pulling stuff out of the pantry that had been in there for years. I made egg foo young and we ate a lot of Vienna sausages. I was also nervous about boys and had a crush on Chris Fryison who was also chubby but had a great smile and made me laugh and bought me Chinese jacks in the 3rd grade. But since I was getting busty, the 8th grade boys started paying attention to me. I was still an early hip hop tomboy wearing bandana’s around my knees, plastic bangles that later had to be cut off, one earring like Janet Jackson and tons of neon pink and green. I had no female adult supervision so I looked a mess. And I had a curl.

One day in June, after my mother had been gone for weeks we were in the bathroom together in my Grandpa’s house. I was sitting on the toilet and she was in the mirror behind the sink. We were facing each other. I remember that part, but then I don’t remember the part of the mythology where I say “Mommy, what’s wrong with you?” I’m afraid that sounds a little too naïve for a girl who’d just told her uncle that he wasn’t coming in her house to look in the safe. My Uncle Sidney was a junkie and a thief and had Drunk Eric from down the street with him. He’s already broken into the safe and stole all the silver dollars and coins Granddad and I had been collecting my whole life. I stood my self in the doorway and told him he was coming in over my dead body and to get the fuck off of my front porch.

But that’s the story she likes to tell because it makes me her conscience. She needs me to be her mirror, but I can’t anymore because it’s too heavy. I can’t be the perfect reflection of her good intentions.

We got off the phone quickly. I hung up and harrumphed. Leslie looked in my direction and I picked up my pipe. Bouncy was screeching in the background and I just looked at him and took a hit. He asked what? And I answered, “nothin’ bullshit.”
That Beyonce sho cain’t sing.

Did I ever tell you about the one when I was growing up?

When I was a kid I lived in a house full of drunks. Not run of the mill drunks, I mean drunks that had doilies on tables and dusted every inch of the house until it was spotless. These were people who used to pick cotton and were terribly ashamed of it. I remember the one and only time I found a book on the top of my grandmother’s ivory wardrobe. It had numbers and names and was ancient. When I found it I took it to my great-grandpa cause he always told me the truth. And then the truth only needed to be that I was loved and adored and there was no other little girl in the world and beautiful and good as me.

When my Granny, his wife, saw that he was explaining the book to me she went ballistic. I never understood why because to me I had history in my hands. My granddad was explaining that this was the book they kept their sharecropping records in.

Anyway, these people drank and drank a lot. My Granny, had my Grandma, when she was 14 years old and Granddad was 21. These weren’t mature people. And they were suddenly in the north with a new set of rules and regulations and Chicago in the 30’s was almost as bad as Jackson, Mississippi- well I guess at anytime by my reckoning. So they drank and had fun (as far as I could see) and lived it up with the relatively few minor freedoms they got to have in the north. Like buying a house in what was previously a majority white neighborhood that would eventually become the murder capital of the city in the next 50 years.

What I realize now is that they were depressed and sad and living unfulfilled lives. They also didn’t know how to nurture us. They didn’t know how to nurture themselves; they hadn’t come from a nurturing environment. The legacy of The South still complicates the lives of those who escaped its horrors. I still live with the legacy of Jim Crow because Jim Crow people raised me. People who now theoretically had more freedoms, but also knew that Chicago’s Jim Crow could be worse. So what do they do with this baby born in the 1970’s without any knowledge of the systems they needed to survive? They teach her the same rules while telling her to fly away, but not too high. And not too fast.

The shames and inadequacies they felt when sober came out in a wale when they were tight. You could hear it in their laughter, the freedom of it. I guess that’s why I always thought they were having such a good time. I rarely saw them this free. But that freedom came with a cost, because as I’m learning in my life, you pay for that freedom the next morning with guilt and more shame. Living a whole life embarrassed and not wanting to pass that embarrassment to your children. It’s living in the fear that a misplaced word will display the short educations prescribed to children who had to work. Not wanting to pass on a shame that you don’t even have the language to denounce. It’s just a feeling.
It feels like sinking. It felt like my body was actually sinking and drowning. My chest would tighten, my skin would go prickly cold and my throat would go dry. Like all of my moisture was evaporating and I was becoming like stone. And then I would turn off. The messages getting yelled at me were getting through, but how I felt about them never really developed past that sense of dread. I get that feeling less often now, but when I was a kid it was constantly overwhelming.
Seeing that book was one of those times that I was conscience that the wrath I was getting had nothing to do with me. It was embarrassment on my Grandma’s part because she was almost hysterical. She told my Grandpa he had no right to show me this book and it was hers. He explained what he was doing, but the reason Grandpa and I had so much time to discuss the book was because she was off taking a nip. I’m sure she fully expected to come back in the room and watch one of her stories, but instead she sees the proof that she picked cotton in the south and whatever that entailed on the lap of her great granddaughter.
The great granddaughter that was going to be proof that they were all okay. She was going to rise above her roots and make everyone so proud. But I didn’t understand that either. I didn’t know there was anything in our lives to be ashamed of (except for the drinking part- that got complicated for me to beg off friends visits).

I think I might be fucked

Calamity Jane: Everyday takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live.

I just want to write down a bunch of curse words and write fucked up stories with fucked up people. But I guess I can't get there cause I keep getting myself fucked. Not in the carnal sense (today) but in the metaphysical sense I guess. I keep creating situations in my head that are preposterous so I can keep myself busy cause I'm bored out of my mind. I just want to party and bullshit right now.

The good thing is that I am keeping busy and feel like I've reconnected with my purpose in life. The thing I like best but would be considered the bad thing is that I'm also setting myself up for a mighty fall. I'm not using the minuscule amount of self control over my thinking on certain things and it's really affecting my life.

Firstly, I've got to go to work soon. This is really some bullshit and besides the fact that right now I feel all production people should be fucked, I don't want to do that. I just don't want to have to go pretend that I give a fuck about Pizza Hut, or Mastercard or anyone who has more money than me. I'm sick of pretending at all and since I'm doing it less and less, I'm getting much better at speaking my real mind and watching people look at me in horror.

Secondly, my own mind is full of rage, lust, sloth and abject hedonism. Rage and lust apparently go everywhere together. They're almost inseparable right now. I never would have guessed them for a couple. But since my lust has a crazy component right now, I just have to write it out and see if I can find a website sick enough to print it. I'm making that sound worse than what I've written, but not what I've thought. My rage is so all emcompassing it can only be satisfied by lust.

Lust, well it's always more difficult isn't it. Lust (or lechery) is an inordinate craving for sexual intercourse often to the point of assuming a self-indulgent, and sometimes violent character (Wikipedia). But there's a component of affection there, supposedly. In order to make the emotion of affection dissapate, I now rely on the lust. But sometimes, when my heart does go a flutter, I flirt with a stranger or spend some serious quality time with myself and computer. I can't deal with "feelings"; I'm learning, but I'm slow learning.


Sloth and hedonism, well they're pretty well matched. I did buy that bottle of Jameson along with other choice fun aides and nothing lasted two days. Two days? And I didn't share but a drop with anyone else. Then the next week brought about sake Thursday. I've apparently created a song and dance revolving around the nectar of the small isle.

But see, I'm still pussyfooting around what it is that I want to say. I'm not telling the whole truth. Maybe I've gotten so good at it that there is no whole truth with me anymore.

But I know one thing, I hate being told what to do and if you want something done you need to do it yourself. That's abstract. I'm in a constant tug of war with my friend and basically pusher of alcohol over the contents of my soul. Or at least my allegiances, or my loyalty. But what she wants is obedience and a reflection of herself as all saving saint that I know is false and therefore can't trust. I'm always a player in the dramas that ensue around her. I try to stay away, but I'm so bored and I want to be with my friends...so I succumb. Then she'll try to help me with something or start pouting cause she's left out or try to find a way to manipulate a situation to create some drama. I'm so sick of it. Now she wants me to clean something that's been dirty for years because she wants it done now. Fuck that. I'm not her kid. I'm not A kid.

When we met I was much more fucked than I am now (which is saying a lot). I had a neediness on me that reeked. When I'm reading my old journals it's the same ole thing: I wish I had money, I wish I had a boyfriend, I'm so lonely, some strange guy was here this morning, smoked too many cigarettes today, I'm fat, I'm so lonely- because I'm fat...it goes on and on for years like that.
Then suddenly there was a light at the end of the tunnel and it was full of booze and it gave me a bunch of people I like a lot and some, not too much. But I stayed cordial. Well, even my cordial is getting thin. I don't have anything to lose so much and I'm sick of being manipulated. I'm really sick of being needed in a way that makes me feel like I'm constantly in a turtleneck. Everything smushed, tits, throat.

Sometimes I think I'll just stay away forever. But I know I can't. That would freak me out more than anything else. I do change slow. When I learn slow, I synthesize. I'm still not even telling the whole truth, but at least I posted today.

My Week 6/3/9

I've decided I'm going to buy a bottle of Jameson's and sit in the house and write and get trashed for the rest of the week. That sounds like fun and will probably be more productive than the so called planning I've been doing to get my work done. Today I got up (at 11a) with good intentions and now it's 4 and I've been taking quizzes in Facebook with my little sister all day. I apparently must fuck off the first 4h of my day no matter what time I get up. So, now I'm gonna go get that bottle, a $5 foot long, see if they have any Sedaris in the biblioteque and come home and hit it.

I have a column/ review that I gave myself a deadline for. WTF was I thinking? They didn't ask for anything but I've volunteered it. I think I wanted to show my go-gettitiveness. But now I've boned myself. I'm gonna watch The Day the Earth Stood Still with the little wooden boy and write something about it. Shit, I need a drink.