Waking Up Naked On My Mother's Grave

——1——

My father married my mother when he was twenty-six years old. My mother was twenty-two. I was the second of their three children, born one year after my brother, Ray, and two years before my sister, Susan. My mother and father had separated two months before my birth (my mother had left my father to live with her sister for a while), so I was born in Brandon, Oregon. Both my brother and sister were born in Ellensburg, Washington. My parents did not reconcile until well over a year after I was born.

When I was about five, my parents were planning to celebrate their fifteenth anniversary. They'd made reservations to fly to Europe for a two-month Mediterranean cruise, and in August, my brother, sister, and I were sent to stay with our grandparents for the summer. Just two weeks after the cruise started, my mother disappeared. At a ship's party, my mother (never what anyone would call a temperate woman) had drunk a bottle of wine and washed it down with two fifths of vodka. She had become unreasonable, angry, and very, very sick. The following morning, she could not be located.

The ship docked at the closest port. The police questioned my father, the other tourists, and the ship's staff. They searched my parents' cabin and inspected all of the other areas of the ship. Their determination was that my mother's death had been an accident. Her extreme intoxication had caused her to fall overboard, and she had drowned at sea. My father returned to the United States immediately. Depressed and confused, he did not collect my brother, my sister, or me from our grandparents until more than three months later.

My mother's disappearance was the first of the three incidents that destroyed my father's life. The second occurred fifteen months after the first. When changing from the right lane to the left on a busy street in Seattle, my father nearly hit a car that was trying to pass him. The other driver braked and skidded to his left (more than he needed to—he was exaggerating), enraged. He followed close behind us for several miles: honking his horn, flashing his lights, waving his arms, screaming, rocking back and forth, and leaning his bug-eyed, bright-red face over his steering wheel and almost up against his windshield.

Eventually we had to stop at a traffic light. We couldn't keep on driving forever (though my father tried). When we were stopped at the light, the lunatic who'd been chasing us jumped out of his car, sprinted to my father's door, grabbed my father by the shirt collar, and pulled him out of the car through the open window. He threw my father ten feet through the air into the gravel on the road's shoulder. My father rolled so he faced away from the lunatic, and the lunatic started kicking him in the back. Hard. The screams were chilling. The lunatic was under six feet tall, but weighed two hundred pounds or more. He wore leather boots with steel tips on the toes.

My father was curled into a ball, with his arms over his face, and the lunatic kicked him in the back again. This kick lifted my father off the ground. He skidded toward the grass in the median and the lunatic chased him, kicking him again and cursing and screaming and waving his arms around. My father rolled over. He tried to stand but he couldn't. The lunatic kicked him three more times, with the instep of his foot, in his belly, just below his ribs. He spit on my father. Cursing. Then he swaggered back to his car and drove off.

Leaving my father lying there, as close to unconscious as a person can be without blacking out. Rocking back and forth slowly. Whispering to himself. Incoherent. Drooling. Crying. After two days of hospital treatment and rest, my father appeared to be getting better, but soon there were sharp pains in his back and in his abdomen. He let each of us put a hand on his belly, on his bluish hospital gown, and I could feel the large, throbbing lump of flesh inside him. He was diagnosed as having suffered an abdominal aneurysm. Over the next four years he had twenty-two operations related to this aneurysm: ten to repair the damage to the artery, and twelve to correct problems that had been caused by the aneurysm: blood clots, infections, and damage to his organs. One kidney, his spleen, two-thirds of one of his lungs, and most of his stomach had to be removed.

Three years after the operations started, the third incident occurred: my father was served with papers that notified him of a civil suit filed against him by his brother, John. When my grandmother had died eight years before, the two brothers had inherited her mail-order business, selling antique dollhouse furniture. My father and mother had kept the business going, paying themselves salaries and paying John half the remaining profits.

But after my mother died, my father let the dollhouse furniture business slide. He couldn't do it by himself. It was just too much work for him. He was forced to sell the business to one of my grandmother's friends. In his lawsuit, John alleged that my father had falsified the business's accounting records and sold the business at a price that was lower than its market value. He thought that my father had accepted an additional payment from the buyer, off-the-books, to avoid paying John his full share.

There was no substance to the lawsuit that I ever heard of though. There wasn't any evidence. So it never actually got in front of a judge, but the paperwork and threats went back and forth between my uncle's lawyers and my father's lawyers for three years, until I was fifteen. Every two or three months would bring a new notice or order: demanding records, requesting my father's sworn responses to endless lists of questions, appointing a CPA as an officer of the court to prepare a report on the books, etc. My father had lost his job before the lawsuit started (he was too sick to work). By the time the lawsuit was over, he was tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

There was too much stress and pain. My father was taking hundreds of pills each day and he was drinking heavily. On a good day, he might have been able to stay awake for six hours. But during those six hours he would do nothing but cry, drink gin, and swallow pills. Sometimes he'd get so frustrated and angry he'd have fits. He'd become rigid, his face and hands would turn purple, and he'd shake so powerfully he couldn't sit down. But there were other times when he'd just sit and stare off into space for hours at a time without moving at all.

Then it ended.

My father was sitting in the living room, looking out the front window. It was one of his better moments until he saw something outside that set him off. It could have been anything. I don't know what it was. He opened his mouth wide and waited a moment before he let out a high, terrified shriek. The shriek turned into a howl. Suddenly he was full of energy. His eyes opened wide, he jumped up, and he ran across the living room and up the stairs to the bedrooms. I listened to him go from room to room: smashing furniture, breaking windows and mirrors, tearing posters off the walls, punching holes in the walls, pulling clothes out of closets, screaming.

After twenty minutes of these primitive noises, it got real quiet. For one minute. For two. Three. Four. My father bounded down the stairs, naked, bleeding from hundreds of small cuts on his chest, arms, and face. He ran across the living room (jumping over Sue, who was lying on the floor, eating Cheetos) and went straight through the screen door, breaking it off its hinges. He ignored the porch steps, jumping from the porch to the walkway. He put his head down, pumped his arms, raced across the lawn, and ran headfirst into an oak tree that was at the corner of our property.

He was stunned (it was a massive tree). Then he looked back at us stupidly. Sue and I were standing together on the porch, staring at him. He screamed. Glistening with blood in the streetlights. His crash into the tree had opened a cut on the top of his head. There was blood over his face, down his chest, and dripping in a steady stream from his crotch. He held his hands on the top of his head, over the cut. He looked at the tree. He staggered. Then he took off. Running as fast as he could. Into the street. Away from the house.

He was institutionalized the next day. He was discovered sleeping on the roof of a restaurant, six miles from our house, dressed in a suit that he had made for himself out of cardboard boxes.

——2——

It was obvious that our father was unable to care for us, and that he hadn't been caring for us for a long, long time. So my sister and I were temporarily placed under the guardianship of the court. My brother, Ray, couldn't be located. He was eighteen, and had left home the year before. We thought that he'd joined the Navy, but when the court officials tried to contact him we found out that he'd lied to us. He wasn't in the Navy (or the Army, Marines, Air Force, or Coast Guard). None of the armed forces knew anything about him.

Because I was seventeen years old and only two months away from graduating high school, and because my godparents, Michael and Gina Bassett, had invited me to live with their family while I completed school, I was emancipated by the court. My sister, Sue, was not given this option. She was too young, and she . . . Well, she had problems.

When our father was institutionalized, my sister and I were moved to a group home. It was a large, grim house to the south of town, run by a married couple that we believed were alcoholics, though we never saw them drinking. There were four other children living in the house with us. I was given some space by myself in the attic: a cot and a wobbly chest of drawers in the middle of a sea of dust-covered boxes, Christmas decorations, electric cords, and discarded furniture.

But Sue had to share a room with a hyperactive twelve-year old girl (I think her name was Mona). And Mona could not keep her mouth shut. Whatever thought came into Mona's mind was only a split second away from coming out her mouth. She irritated the hell out of Sue. Sue could barely think when Mona was around, and Mona was around all the time. Hopping. Shouting. Pointing. Being Sue's best buddy.

Sue was sitting on one of the stools at the breakfast counter, talking on the telephone. I was in the same room, reading. And Mona was after Sue about something. Yapping in her face about sharing and how Sue just didn't have the right attitude and joking with her in a friendly way (though they weren't friends by any stretch of the imagination) about how she was going to have to straighten Sue out. Mona's short brown hair was wet. She'd just bathed, but she still had the stink of peanut butter and sour milk on her.

And Sue was trying to ignore Mona. She was hunched over, turned away, holding the receiver tight against her ear. But then it was too much for her to bear. She swung around, lifted the beige plastic phone casing up off the breakfast counter, and swung it down as hard and fast as she could on the top of Mona's head. Shouting at Mona, Shut up, you little freak! She hit Mona so hard that the beige plastic shell of the phone cracked into two pieces. It sounded like a firecracker. Mona crumpled up like she'd died. Her face went gray. Her body seemed to be just empty clothes in a heap on the carpet near the door.

Consequences followed quickly. While being visited in the