Lit: A Memoir

Prologue: Open Letter to My Son

SIDE A : NOW

Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out.

How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.

And should I balk at your recall, you may bring out the video camera you’ve had strapped to your face since you were big enough to push the red Record button. You’ll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to reveal—not the Italian boot—but tiny replicas of penis and testicles. Cock and balls. That’s why the guys who sold it to me laughed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen.

Through that fishbowl lens, you’ve been looking for the truth most of your life. Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on me, and I’ve felt like Odysseus, albeit with less guile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself embodying the one-eyed cyclops. You’re not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is. Or replay is. Or I am.

Still, I want to show that single eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes me from this juncture.

However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors.

Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation.

Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apartment drove you to my place, where I was packing for a trip. So I let go my cat sitter and left you prowling old video footage like a scholar deciphering ancient manuscripts. How much pleasure your concentration gave me. From the raw detritus of the past, you’re shaping your own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man.

Days later, when my taxi pulled up, you came down to help haul bags. At six-two, you’re athletic like your father, with his same courtly manner—an offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself. While manhandling my mammoth suitcase through two security doors, you managed to hold each one open for me with your foot. The next instant I registered—peeking from the top of your saggy jeans—the orange boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid.

Inside, loading books into your messenger bag, you mentioned watching for the first time a video of Mother and me, filmed years ago by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house of my kidhood. Mother was recounting her psychotic episode—the seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has coming.

You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear of my writing about it—a healthy fence blocking my public life from your private one. But the old video stirred something in you.

It was kind of crazy, you said.

You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras.

I thought you meant Mother’s story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated she’d butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell.

Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood.

This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Don’t Give Me Drugs.

You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought I’d kill you before they all got to hurt you.

Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over.

I’d all but forgotten the tape. So after you’d gone, I played it—maybe for the first time all the way through.

It’s a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we’ve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mother’s pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe she’s wearing would suit a Wiccan priestess. Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as marble skin, which still looks dewy.

She reads some gnostic texts about goddesses and gods and the Christ within each of us. She pauses every now and then to say, Isn’t that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo.

Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower my nephew gave her for Mother’s Day. She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine—a song my daddy used to sing to me on the way to fishing.

Don’t you love that? she says. It’s silly, but I love it.

I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldn’t imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women. So I decided to kill you both, to spare you.

How long had you been drinking?

Oh I wasn’t drunk, Mother says. Maybe I’d had a few drinks.

This completely counters her earlier version, in which she’d claimed to have been shitfaced. But I don’t press it. She shrugs at me, adding, Sheesh.

I’d never think to go over this footage myself but for you, Dev. You’re showing my life to me through a new window—not just the video, either. Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis-à-vis Mother.

For I partly see her through your vantage. You never knew the knife-wielding goddess of death. She’s your gray-haired grandmother, the one I was always trying to protect you from, even though she was sober when you knew her. Her rages had dissipated, but her child-rearing judgment never improved.

You still think it’s funny that she let you screen—at age eight—the über-violent Pulp Fiction because she found your interest in nonlinear film methods artistic. But I’d stood before her sputtering, What about the sodomy, Mother?

From the corner of the room, you asked what exactly sodomy was.

Mother said, When the man hurt the other man.

You asked her if it was the guy with the bondage ball in his mouth.

Jesus, Mother, I said. You see!

Well, he was interested in the movie when his cousin talked about it, Mother said.

It’s a testament to your desire to avoid further conflict that you waited till we were on the plane to tell me she’d also shown you—at the outset of our visit—a pearl-handled revolver in her pocket-book. Her rationale? She didn’t want you coming across it in her purse.

I’d never go through Grandma Charlie’s purse, you said.

Still, you considered the pistol incident something I’d want to know, while you reassured me you were disinclined to play with a loaded weapon.

Mostly, Mother couldn’t hurt you. But I both could and did.

The time I’m mostly thinking of, you were barely four, which—I would argue—is less like being a miniature person than like a dog or cat who can talk. Your father and I were coming to pieces, and not long after, you came to see me in the hospital.

You remember the embossed smiley faces on my green slippers. You remember the red-haired woman so psychotic she once landed in four-point restraints just about the time you got there with your Ninja Turtle lunch box, and you could hear her howls.

We had a picnic one summer afternoon when you visited, and the hospital grounds so evoked the playing fields where your father distinguished himself that you told your teachers at daycare that I was at a slumber party at Harvard.

We both remember, albeit in varying tones of gray and black and shit brown, the misery I mired us in.

That’s the story I want to tell: how I started getting drunk. How being drunk got increasingly hard, and being not drunk felt impossible. In Odyssean terms, I’d wanted to be a hero, but wound up—as Mother did—a monster.

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall.

Blameless, the Greek translators call it. That’s what Odysseus wished for his son, Telemachus: to live guilt free. As a teenager myself, reading how Odysseus boffed witches and fought monsters, I inked the word blameless on the bottom of my tennis shoe. And my favorite part was always when he came home after decades and no one knew him.

As you get older, you look at me more objectively—or try to. As I become strange to you in some ways, you’ve become more familiar to yourself. Maybe you could loan me some of the shine in your young head to clear up my leftover dark spaces. Just as you’re blameless for the scorched parts of your childhood, I’m equally exonerated for my own mother’s nightmare. Maybe I can show you how I came to peace, how she and Daddy wound up as blameless in my story as you are.

Before you left the other night, you added—in the form of afterthought—what was, to me, the most dramatic news I’d heard that night: after the tape of your grandmother, you’d read nearly fifty pages of my own memories.

You added, I’m gonna use that and some footage of Grandma for my documentary class.

I watched you disappear down the stairs and wanted to call you back but thought better of it. Your girlfriend was with you, and you were so loaded down with bags and equipment. And something about those orange boxers with their cartoon fish—they draw from me such a throat-clenching nostalgia for a younger version of you—an image at odds with the man you are.

You’re disembarking now, I can see it. Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us.

SIDE B: THEN

At the end of my drinking, the kingdom I longed for, slaved for, and at the end of each day lunged at was a rickety slab of unreal estate about four foot square—a back stair landing off my colonial outside Cambridge, Mass. I’d sit hunched against the door guzzling whiskey and smoking Marlboros while wires from a tinny walkman piped blues into my head. Though hours there were frequently spent howling inwardly about the melting ice floe of my marriage, this spate of hours was the highlight of my day.

I was empress of that small kingdom and ruled it in all weathers. Sleet, subzero winds, razor-slicing rain. I’d just slide a gloved hand over my tumbler, back hunched against the door. I defended my time there like a bull with a lowered head, for that was the only space in the world I had control of.

However I thought things were in that spot, so they were. No other place offered as much. My sole link to reality was the hard plastic baby monitor. Should a cough or cry start, its signal light stabbed into my wide pupil like an ice pick.

That’s a good starting point, the red pinpoint eye. If I squint inward at it and untether my head from the present, time stops. I close my eyes. From that center dot, I can dive into the red past again, reenter it. Blink, the old porch blooms around me, like a stage set sliding into place, every gray industrial board. Holding the monitor is my smooth thirty years’ hand. The cuticles are chewed raw, but there’s nary vein nor sun blotch. On the yellow fisherman’s coat over my pajamas, rain goes pat pat pat.

Not one thing on the planet operates as I would have it, and only here can I plot my counterattacks.

Problem one: The fevers my year-old son gets every few weeks can spike to 105°, which means waking the husband, a frantic trip to Children’s Hospital, a sleepless night in the waiting room. No reason for this, nothing wrong with his immune system or growth. They’ll give him the cherry-flavored goop that makes him shit his brains out, and the cough will ease, but his stomach will cramp, and on the nights he ingests that medicine, he’ll draw his stumpy legs to his chest in agony and ball up tight, then arch his back and scream, and though no one suggests this is my fault, my inability to stop it is my chief failure in the world.

Problem two: If he’s sick, I’ll have to cancel classes so maybe the real professors who just hired me on a friend’s recommendation—despite my being too muttonheaded to sport a very relevant diploma—will fail to renew me next semester. I’ve published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. It’s like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is.

Problem three: Our landlords, the Loud Family. This time, they’re after Dev’s blue blow-up wading pool. They left a message: If there’s a yellow circle in the lawn, our security deposit must cover the cost of sodding. Sod off, I said to the answering machine, shooting it the finger, both barrels, underhanded, like pistolas from a holster. Double-dog damn them. Mr. Loud plans to spend all spring and summer painting the house. All today he stood on a ladder scraping—meticulously by hand—lead paint. Meanwhile, his old-time transistor blares the so-called easy-listening channel—zippity doo-dah for nine hours—and he’s only cleared a four-foot square, and I have to tape shut Dev’s room so no lead gets in. Mr. Loud’s bringing a boom box tomorrow, and all his Peter, Paul & Mary tapes. Do I remember Puff the Magic Dragon, he wants to know. Do I? On my fun scale, it ranks with the Nuremberg Trials. Virtually every hour, Mr. Loud trudges loudly in to pee—age maybe seventy, one plaid thermos, yet the guy pees like Niagara Falls. By dusk, he’s washing his brushes in my sink, while in my mind, I’m notching an arrow in my bow and aiming it at his ass.

Problem four—minor but ongoing: I’m just a smidge further in the bag tonight than I’d planned on, which keeps happening. The yard hasn’t started to spin like a roulette wheel yet. I’m upright, but even the slightest list can set it off. Posture’s what I need, balance, like walking with a book on my head, which I always sucked at. Unless I keep that bubble exactly in the middle, the whirlies will start. Tip my head even one inch to the left, the oak tree pitches right. Unless I focus extra-hard at something close, I’ll tumble off the face of the planet, trailing puke as I fly. What helps is staring at the index finger. Just foreground it and let the rest fuzz up. I sit upright against the kitchen door, staring at my own finger like it’s the Delphic oracle.

And there I sit, poised as if on a flagpole, feeling with my free hand for my drink, when the wisp of an idea trails through my head. It doesn’t last, but it’s audible: you’re the bad mom in the afterschool special, the example other moms—little parentheses drawn down around their glossy mouths—go to the principal about.

Oh, horseshit, I think. Mother fell down and pissed her pants, Daddy got in fistfights and drank himself to death. (Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) I turned out half okay; well, a quarter—at least a tenth okay.

As a new mother, I used to cup my son’s downy head with wild tenderness and marvel at his heavy slump in my arms, and for the few moments his china-blue eyes fixed on mine before they closed, it was as if the sky had been boiled down and rendered into that small gaze. Those first months, I fed him from myself. And doing so felt like the first true and good act I’d managed in my whole slipshod life.

Then I started drinking every day and stopped breastfeeding, and tonight, while holding the bottle to his working mouth, I averted my eyes for fear he’d see the gutshot animal I’m morphing into, which mirrors the mother I fled to keep from becoming, the one who shoved me off—Don’t hug me, you’re making me hot her tagline.

Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an expectant grin, I’ll shoo him away. Sex of the calf-roping variety still takes place, but otherwise, I’d felt so alone with my son that first year when night after sleepless night I’d gotten up while the husband slept like a hog in his wallow with a white-noise machine to mask the loud misery I gave off—now we connect at no point.

Now nights, I sit downstairs on the porch and stare into the black hole of the garage, which, in my childhood cosmology, was where my oil-worker daddy sat in the truck and drank himself to death. After he staggered into the house to pass out—first bumping against the sides of the hall like a train conductor—I’d go out to the garage and stand with my back to the wall, waiting for the headlights of my mother’s vehicle to come swerving up the dead-end street we lived on. Through sheer force of will, I’d draw her drunk ass home alive. Daddy was steady and stayed. Mother was an artist and left. Those two opposing colossi tore a rip in my chest I can’t seem to stitch shut.

The garage faces me like an empty pit, and I sit on the house’s threshold facing it till the edges of the square hole go blurry. If I were a real poet, I’d be composing a sonnet about the fairy mist in yon oak. Instead, I stare at my finger with dwindling success, for behind it, the view is getting wavery, and in an attempt to adjust, to regain my bearings, I tip my face up slightly into summer rain, which move makes the world take an unprecedented lurch. My head pitches back like a Pez dispenser. The postage-stamp backyard whips from view.

I am leaning the top of my head against the door when I spot for the zillionth time—Problem Six?—the burnt-out lightbulb I fail every day to change, the cartoon idea I every night fail to get.