* * *
—
My job summarizing depositions was drying up. I was being replaced by software. I kept telling interviewers of the future that no matter how bleak my current situation was, I had faith in myself as a writer, so much faith that I never made fallback plans, like getting a reliable job. This was a bad idea.
I won a local fiction contest. (Darcy raced to my house upon hearing the news, took off her clothes, and cried out, “You’re my James Joyce,” which made me love her more.) There was nothing phenomenal in my progression—I’d been getting a little bit better every time I sat down to write. But agents still didn’t like any of the novels (I’d finished three of them) I was sending out. I was still in a hole. I needed money.
I worried that the story I’d published might have been a fluke. I asked Darcy, “What if this is the end for me?”
She hugged me. “Baby, this isn’t even the beginning.”
Part of me wants this thought to linger: alongside her abrasiveness, Darcy was supportive and often loving. I’d like to say there was a reason why I stayed for four years, and I’d say “it wasn’t so bad.” But that would echo intolerably. It reminded me of my mother crying to me over the phone not to judge Daniel, that there were good times, I had to believe there were good times, didn’t I believe her?
THE UNDERTOAD
HERE IS THE PHONE RINGING. It could happen anytime. I was frightened by the sound, because I never knew what was going to happen if my mother was calling.
Mom once said that she and Daniel were driving down to Oakland, and they would come see me and Darcy. I told her no. I told her that Daniel was not welcome at my house. She was startled, and she said that I was being unfair, and I said that might be true, but I felt unsafe. She couldn’t understand why. I explained that she said he wanted to kill me. She said that he was just feeling threatened. I told her I felt threatened sometimes but managed to not say I wanted to kill anyone. She paused for a good, long time, maybe a minute of silence on the phone, and said she wouldn’t be speaking to me again anytime soon, and she hung up.
Then she called a month later as if nothing had happened. And called again and again. Sometimes she asked about my writing. Sometimes she said she and I would both write great books about our lives, a mother and son, writing. She was proud of me for continuing to write even if I needed to get a desk job. “When we come down,” she would say, and I would say, “Mom, I’ll see you but not Daniel,” and she would ask me why, and then the conversation would go the way I’ve said, and she wouldn’t call for a week or a month.
Sometimes she would try a different tack. I would receive parcels. Candy. A wicker scoop used for fishing in ponds. Part of a gum ball machine. Books. A brick of cheese that had been cut open and resealed with duct tape. The ruffled shirts and polyester suits from a short, fat, dead man’s storage locker.
“When we get on our feet, you should come visit,” Mom said. They lived in and around Las Vegas, then Oregon, I think in San Diego again, and definitely near Sacramento, sometimes in rentals, sometimes in shady arrangements I didn’t ask for details on. For some weeks they lived in what I think was a survivalist’s compound in the desert, leaving abruptly. My mother sent me the first few pages of a short story about it that foreshadowed an appalling event, but the story was unfinished.
I’ll never know what happened between them on a daily basis. My mother lied to me. I don’t know how much. When they were anyplace for more than a week or two, her descriptions of the places became more enchanted and perfumed. Come stay on a cot, she said, or there was a sleeping bag for me, or a bed for me and Darcy, or they were saving for a deposit so we could have a room for ourselves. Daniel would get a catering job or cook at a restaurant until his meth use got him fired.
My mother told me it wasn’t his fault. He’d grown up unloved. His mother was irresponsible and cold, flinty, and self-centered.
Darcy nodded when she heard that. “Daniel is your mother’s good son,” she said.
That was incisive. He was a compulsive gambler at bingo and the state lottery, using my mother’s money, then his, to buy fifty Scratcher tickets at a time. He called her a fucking bitch. He was the good son.
* * *
—
I was completely out of money. On the first of the month, July 1992, I paid half my rent and, lying to my landlord, promised to have the rest by the fifteenth. I had no prospects.
I applied at a temp agency, which turned out to be problematic. My hair was unruly and long, which meant I needed a haircut, but my motorcycle was also out of gas. Luckily, the couch I’d bought at a thrift store turned out to have a couple of dollars in change under the cushions, but that was everything I had. I put some gel in my hair and a dollar’s worth of gas into my tank, and rode to the agency.
The test showed I typed seventy words a minute, and because one method of procrastination for me was to delve into the guts of MS Word to see what strange features might make my manuscripts look interesting, I was an “advanced word processor.” But I knew nothing about spreadsheets and my suit had come from a thrift store, so the agency pondered sending me only to places where “professional attire” wasn’t required.
If I could go to work somewhere that day, I would have a small paycheck by the weekend, which I would put toward my rent. They ran a credit check on me, to see if I could be bonded, and found a note from the Internal Revenue Service. Apparently when I had worked as a short order cook in Las Vegas, I hadn’t paid taxes on my income.
The woman reported this to me, and looked up to see if I had an explanation. People had good explanations all the time.
“I’ve never worked in Las Vegas.”
“It’s right here.”
I looked. There it was, my Social Security number, right next to Daniel’s name. He had used my card, which he’d apparently stolen the same day he’d eaten Lindsay’s Valentine’s candy, to defraud the government of some income tax.
When you don’t know what a normal parent is, you tend to not react within the range of behavior that, say, a potential employer would recognize. So I was naive when I said, as if this was a reasonable explanation, “That’s my mother’s boyfriend.”
The woman blinked at me. “Pardon?”
I kept going. I said he was a junkie, they probably lived in their bus then, and I’d never visited them even though my mom wanted us to pretend we were a family. I can’t tell you why I talked so much. This wasn’t just naive now—it was information that no one would ever professionally need to know.
But another thing about how I grew up is that I frequently find I’m not alone. The woman said, “I have a mom like that.” She gave me the address of a place that needed help that afternoon.
I did well enough there to get hired at another place, and then another. It wasn’t much, but this is how I started getting a regular paycheck.
* * *
—
Darcy and I moved in together. I was hoping my friends would talk me out of it. They didn’t.
She wanted to work in film. She immediately got a series of local production assistant jobs on Bay Area shoots. She turned out to be fantastic at coordinating complex projects. She never forgot a task or dawdled when dawdling was forbidden. She worked twelve or sixteen hours easily and her weird and angular sense of humor made her fit in. Every job recommended her for the next shoot. At cast parties, the more approachable stars told me I was lucky to have her. She said, “The right people trust me and the rest are frightened.”
She was the first person I was close to who was different privately than in public. The closer you were to Darcy, the meaner she was.
I have problems with anger, I thought. I’m learning by being with her. This anger is good for me.
I retired the first three novels I had in circulation with agents, as the pages of the manuscripts were too dirty, advertising how
often they’d been sent out. I started writing a new book. I’d read a few recent first novels by men my age who were either better writers than I was, or luckier and better connected, that had been published to acclaim. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but each of them had the same sneaky way of letting us know how sensitive his protagonist was: his mother had died. This enraged me. I started writing a novel called My Dead Mom.
It was about a bad writer named Glen David Gold who is struck mute when hit by a lightning bolt that also kills his mother. I couldn’t tell if it was good, but as I wrote, it started generating its own gravity and rules. I had ideas that made me laugh about what was going to happen in ten or twenty or a hundred pages.
At the time, my mother and Daniel were living in a cabin near the Sierra foothills. Daniel’s drug habit had gotten out of hand. He was violent and he was stealing money from her. She made a series of phone calls to me over a couple of weeks, whispered, hand over the receiver. She’d stood up to him. He’d left her. He came back, promising to get clean.
I couldn’t keep up with the shifts in her situation, but I know how it ended. He seems to have had a break from reality and, isolated in that cabin, finally tried to kill my mother. She called the cops. Daniel pulled a knife on them.
My mother called me late that night, frantic, telling me the story in full as I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. She was horrified, outraged, in a panic she needed me to understand. I was detached, listening to a soap opera update and hoping the story would end with the cops killing him.
Unfortunately, they showed restraint, disarming Daniel and sending him to a mental hospital. Mom continued to tell me of Daniel’s journey into the hospital with the same breathless panic, there were guards, he was being arrested, and I realized that this was the horror she needed to communicate, not the assault, but that Daniel had been taken away from her.
* * *
—
My mother moved into a women’s shelter, took a job assembling TV dinner trays, and later lived with a woman whose children were trying to have her declared incompetent so they would inherit their share of their father’s estate.
Mom had a therapist. She hadn’t had a therapist in years. She told him—and then told me she’d told him—that one of her main problems was that I didn’t like Daniel. The therapist asked what was at the root of that. She said, “Glen doesn’t like Daniel because he ate some of his girlfriend’s Valentine’s candy.”
If there was still a rhetorician in me, a smug one that wanted to pin my mother’s wings to the page above a Latin appellation, I’d end that story right there. It would be a cruel story, and I could dust my hands together like a villain. Her story continues, though. The therapist said, “If I were your son, I’d hate Daniel, too.”
My mother told me this and didn’t pause after finishing it, as this was her proof the therapist was against her. This, she explained, angry now at the world, and me, and feeling righteous, was why she was leaving the shelter and returning to Daniel.
* * *
—
The chronology, never easy to follow, tangles here to impenetrability. Daniel left the hospital, reunited with my mother, they quarreled again, he fled to San Diego on a drug binge. She took him in again, he promised to give up drugs, he returned to the hospital, where he was put on complete disability. The government would pay Daniel six hundred dollars a month, plus all of his medical bills.
During the physical, the doctors discovered Daniel was HIV positive.
This was a death sentence. For him, but not my mother, apparently—she said that they had stopped the physical part of their relationship some time before.
I began to feel relief, but it was clouded over by wondering how much damage Daniel could do before his life ended. My mother was too canny to ask me to come up, or to say they would visit again. Instead, over a few weeks, she dropped broad hints about how much Daniel had changed since he’d given up the meth. He was motivated, he worked hard. She no longer had to hide her purse. What she was actually saying: these were his final days and she saw a sunset in which everyone would be friends.
* * *
—
I finished my manuscript. I had however burned out my circle of friends, who had read multiple drafts of my first three not particularly good novels.
A friend knew a literary agent and got him to agree to read My Dead Mom. A couple of days later, my phone rang. The agent had just started reading it. He thought it was brilliant. He asked if we could meet at the end of the week. I said, Sure, sure, of course, and agreed to the time and place he suggested. I’d been down similar roads before so I tried not to get my hopes up, even as I still got my hopes up.
The night before our meeting, he called again. “I finished reading your book,” he said slowly. “But I still want to meet with you.” This reset my expectations.
In person, he was caffeinated and trim and quick with verbal jabs. When he figured out that I could take criticism, he took my manuscript from his satchel, and he put it into three piles, the first forty pages, the next seventy, and the final two hundred. He brought his palm down on each of them in quick order, and said, “Great, Good, Crap. What happened?”
This was the nicest thing anyone had said about my work in months. He explained that I’d begun a great plot line, but I’d gotten in the way of it. I was too goddamn clever. I abandoned my setup to show off. Had I thought about applying to writing programs? Iowa? UC Irvine? Use the first forty pages of My Dead Mom for my application. He said they were good enough to show my promise and flawed enough to show I could learn something.
He asked me how old I was.
“Thirty.”
“Ah, congratulations.”
“Why?”
“You wanted to write the great American novel before you were thirty. You failed. You’re free,” he said.
THE PUT-DOWN ARTIST
A FEW DAYS AFTER DARCY’S BIRTHDAY, a package showed up, a crate of mandarin oranges from my mom. Some of them were molding, but many weren’t. Darcy thought it was a nice gesture.
I called Mom to thank her. She told me about Daniel’s new meds and how happy he was to see a mental health film about manic depression because it labeled him so accurately. He was on antipsychotics, anti-allergy pills, and AZT, and no one knew what the interactions would do. A month later, he couldn’t get out of bed, but then he could, and he was doing well. A month after that, his legs were paralyzed and there was some kind of mass growing in his intestines. He was supposed to die at any minute. He stopped taking his meds and he felt better.
Another month went by. The doctors said he had terminal cancer but then a month later they weren’t sure. He seemed to be getting better. He was off drugs. Mom said he was a different person, or rather he was the person he should have been, the bright and kind one who had surfaced from underneath all the drugs.
I wasn’t interested in seeing him, still. But I had a nagging thought that maybe I wasn’t giving him credit. People did redeem themselves. When I compared my mother and Daniel to me and Darcy, they did seem like the happier couple.
They had a setup that sounded as if it suited them well. My mother had taken a job managing a mini-storage. Daniel was wheeling and dealing at the local swap meet. They took over the lien sales held when mini-storage customers failed to pay their bills. Daniel was a born auctioneer, and the townspeople loved talking to my mother, whose accent lent the operation a touch of class.
They had a secondhand place stocked with items from the mini-storage or local estate sales or Sunday swap meets. They lived in a trailer that was cluttered and cozy and that had a garden in back where they’d planted tomatoes. Daniel bought and sold furniture. He fixed up the house, played bingo in church, and had started panning for gold. He had a society of other gold panners and Big Spin fans to trade theories of luck with.
He started collecting inte
resting rocks that he found on his long walks in the countryside. My mother bought him modeling paints. He painted funny faces on the ones with the most evocative shapes. On my thirtieth birthday, I received two rocks, one painted like a wolf and the other like a medicine man.
I also received an audiotape called “Missy Sings Happy Birthday.” Daniel had rescued a shaggy, squat orange dog I thought looked like a Butterball turkey. He and my mother knew nothing of her past except that whenever they opened a newspaper, Missy tried to hide. Missy tolerated my mother, barked at everyone else, and focused her attention on Daniel as if he were the sun. He fed her meat from his plate and every night after dinner, he said, “Missy, where’s your dolly?” And Missy would bring him a little doll, and they would play catch. Daniel loved to sing, and when Missy heard him, she tried to sing along. Hence the birthday tape.
I hated the dog. Violently. I made fun of how she looked, only I called her “it.” Every photograph I received, every anecdote I heard just focused my hatred. It was an ugly dog. It barked. They couldn’t even come up with a name that different than the kitten Daniel had probably strangled. It was a little like thunderheads finally breaching when I thought, “This dog doesn’t prove a fucking thing.” Then I realized it wasn’t the dog’s fault. I wasn’t being fair.
In summer 1994, I relented and agreed to visit. Darcy and I drove to their town, four or five parched blocks sliced by the freeway an hour past Sacramento. When we pulled up, Mom ran to a banner she’d hung, “Welcome Glen and Darcy,” and we took turns posing in front of it.
I Will Be Complete Page 47