My options were shit. I was losing my mind in this weird free fall and reached down deep to get it to stop.
I did the unthinkable. I called my Mother.
Now, our relationship was odd, as she had nothing to do with me from the time I was seven until I was fifteen when I moved in with her and husband number four in a small town in Oklahoma.
They met at the State Hospital. He was a butcher by trade, but told me in private he was a secret agent. Said he was one of the one's they sent to get Francis Gary Powers from the Soviet Union. Yeah, and I was Eleanor Roosevelt.
She found him hanging one day in the front yard. Swinging from a mulberry tree, his face bloated and purple. There was no note.
She got drunk and bought a pet rooster.
She loved often but desperately and her choices were poorer than mine.
Her last husband had killed his wife in a car crash, and the guilt left him totally impotent, and to tell the truth, pretty fucked up.
My Mom and I were more like Harold and Maude, and he was jealous of whatever it was we had with each other.
There was no apple pie and Motherly advice. There were Viceroy cigarettes stubbed out in my eggs, and the smell of nail polish remover, and the memory of a quart of cheap vodka under the kitchen sink.
But she was sober, and she knew where I was. I sincerely believe she wanted to help.
She sent me a bus ticket, and said sure baby, come on home.
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