by Kambri Crews
In the first weeks of school, I landed the lead role of Bunny Watson in the fall play, The Desk Set. I was back to my busy schedule of school, rehearsals, homework, and shifts at Malibu. My mother and I still lived at the apartment, but she was working up to eighty hours a week to make ends meet. Rob drove me to and from school and rehearsals and, on his off nights, slept in my twin bed. Mom didn’t object to his staying over. We both felt safer with him there.
On opening night, Mom and Rob greeted me in the school lobby at the end of the final curtain, each holding a single red rose. I hoped Rob would gush and be overwhelmed by my talent. Instead he shyly handed me my flower and said, “Pretty good, kiddo.”
The second night of the play, Charity squealed, “Hey, Kambri! Somebody sent you roses!”
“What? Where?”
“They’re in the dressing room.”
I couldn’t imagine who would send them. Mom and Rob had already given me flowers. I opened the card and was surprised to learn they came from Steve, a tall, handsome blue-eyed blond who was on the basketball team and ran with the popular, preppy crowd.
“You were wonderful. Break a leg tonight. Love, Steve.”
My heart fluttered with excitement. After the show, I met Steve in the lobby, where he looked positively starstruck, as though I were Bernadette Peters and this was not the auditorium of Richland High School but the boards of Broadway. He gave me a long hug and congratulated me on a job well done. That was all it took—roses and a hug—and I was his.
Dad had stopped coming around. Mom worked so much that he could never find her at home and things seemed to calm down. I was finally able to focus on being a high school senior. Being wooed by a popular jock was intoxicating. While circumstances at home may have made me grow up too fast, at the end of the day I was still a typical teenage girl. I liked the idea of having two guys vying for me. It reminded me of how my mother was dating another boy when Dad relentlessly pursued her.
Rob’s shifts often didn’t coincide with my hours at school and rehearsal schedule, so I used that as the excuse to break up. Things at home were not as volatile, and I didn’t need his protection. Too timid to tell him in person, I broke the news over the phone.
Rob was crushed, but he didn’t cry or get angry. He told me that he loved me and that he would agree if it was what I wanted.
Steve, like me, was active in school and together we bounced from basketball games to assemblies, from after-school parties to variety shows. I couldn’t believe someone so clean cut and popular wanted to date me. He made me feel normal, and normal was all I wanted to be.
David, however, was reaching a tipping point.
Mom thought David’s troubles might be the result of his upbringing. “We should never have smoked marijuana in front of you kids. Maybe I shouldn’t have let you watch so many R-rated movies when you were little.”
Dad thought the downfall started around the time David was caught sniffing paint with Allen in the Kings’ barn. “That ruins your mind,” he signed, shaking his head in disappointment. “It kills your brain cells.”
Whatever it was, it was a combustible combination. My parents tried several times to check my brother into a hospital, but unless he was deemed to be a threat to himself or the public, he was allowed to leave under his own free will.
“But he is a threat! How can they just let him walk out?” I asked.
“It’s the law,” Mom sighed. Even David’s old friend Allen, who had been clean and sober since leaving Montgomery and was serving in the military, knew something was wrong. He had recently visited David and was so jarred by my brother’s appearance and behavior that he secretly talked with my mother. He urged her to intervene, telling her that her son was likely addicted to crank and who knows what else. She followed Allen’s advice, played the tough-love card, and refused to allow David to stay with us.
Dad took him in but was unequipped to deal with my brother’s problems and quickly grew impatient. After just a few weeks, he ordered David to leave. It was wintertime and David was left alone to deal with the elements. One particularly cold night, during a rare snowstorm in Fort Worth, David returned to my father’s doorstep begging for shelter. Dad refused. Snowfall or not, David was on his own. He became transient, disappearing for weeks only to resurface looking dazed and wild-eyed and in need of money or a ride from a bus station.
Eventually Mom’s parents stepped in and took David into their home in Oklahoma, hoping the change in scenery and Grandpa Worth would knock some sense into him. Just like Mom, Dad, and me, Grandma Worth quickly became terrified of David, and Grandpa Worth couldn’t reason with him. They were heartbroken and powerless. Next, Dad’s sister Cathy opened her home, offering David a place to stay in Fort Worth. Another of Dad’s sisters offered to enroll him in a drug rehabilitation facility in Winnsboro, Texas, about a two and a half hour car ride from Fort Worth and run by the Assembly of God ministries.
When he agreed, Mom needed to pick up some things of David’s that were still at Dad’s apartment to send to him. She also needed money for bills. She was uncomfortable going alone so she asked me to drive her. I had never been to Dad’s apartment and didn’t want to see him, but I knew I needed to be there with Mom in case trouble started.
His apartment was on the first floor of a run-down complex on a busy roadway in a seedy part of town. We rang the doorbell and waited for Dad to let us in. He greeted Mom casually and looked genuinely happy to see me. He gave me a hug and waved me in. While he and Mom signed back and forth, I remained by the front door and looked around. The apartment was dingy. It was odd seeing pieces of our furniture from the trailer at Boars Head, like the matching maroon hide-a-bed sofa to the one Mom and I had at our place. The cheap plastic blinds had clearly come with the apartment and the worn acrylic shag carpeting showed years of wear and tear. A layer of dust covered the hodgepodge of knickknacks.
Dad noticed me eyeing his things and signed, “B-A-C-H-E-L-O-R P-A-D. H-A-H-A-H-A.”
I smiled and he took me by the shoulder and gave me a tour of his place. “This knife is from World War II. It used to belong to a German soldier. See the swastika? That means Nazi.”
He pointed to a black-and-white framed photo of a man pinning an award on a soldier. “That’s President Truman and that’s my uncle—your great-uncle, John R. Crews—getting the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest, best award a soldier can receive.”
Mom was growing impatient with the wait. Dad had been doing odd jobs and was still collecting disability checks, but he still hadn’t given her the money she was expecting. She wanted to leave and when she demanded that he write a check, they started bickering.
Unlike their confrontation weeks earlier, we weren’t trapped in our own apartment. We didn’t have to be there. My instinct was to flee. “Mom, let’s just leave!” I shouted. “Stop arguing, please!”
Mom’s hands were in a flurry of angry signs and Dad kept grabbing at them to stop her from signing, making her angrier.
“Please, Mom, let’s go!”
She finally listened to me and gave a grand flip of her open palm and charged toward the front door. Dad was enraged that she had picked this fight and was not going to stick around to finish it. I flew out the front door with Mom closely behind me. “Go, go, go, go!” Mom screamed as Dad followed us to the parking lot.
Mom and I jumped into our car and locked our doors just as Dad grabbed at my handle on the driver’s side. I started the car and threw it into reverse. Angry that we were getting away, Dad balled up his fist and slammed it into my window. The sight of his fist barreling toward my face momentarily stunned me. The punch was deafening, but to my amazement, the window didn’t shatter.
My tires squealed out of the parking spot and I saw Dad running toward his own car. Worried that he would chase us back to our new apartment, I slammed the gas pedal and sped through the parking lot.
“Kambri! My God, slow down!”
“Leave me alone.” I wasn’t
listening to her. My flight instinct was in overdrive. Without looking for traffic, I sped across four lanes of two-way traffic. Cars honked and swerved and tires squealed as drivers slammed on their brakes to avoid us.
“Kambri, you’re gonna get us killed!”
“Shut up!” I screeched.
Mom held her breath as she clenched her seat. I didn’t know where to go and knew I needed to calm down. I had nearly killed us in my frantic getaway. I parked the car behind a Dumpster and caught my breath. My hands trembled as irate thoughts swirled through my mind. Why did Mom go over to my father’s in the first place? Why couldn’t she sense when it was time to leave? And how could Dad throw a punch at me, even if there was a pane of thick glass between us?
Back at the apartment, my heart was still racing when the phone rang. I answered with a terse greeting. It was Steve calling. We’d been dating a few weeks and I really liked him. Sweet and sensitive as he was, though, I couldn’t imagine putting him in the position to have a showdown with Dad. That would have been the last thing I would want kids at school to hear about. I wanted to protect him from this nightmare and myself from the embarrassment.
“Don’t call me anymore,” I said, curtly.
“Why? What did I do wrong?” Steve was mystified. He hadn’t done anything. In fact, we were having the time of our lives. I quickly pushed away any empathy.
“You didn’t do anything; just leave me alone,” I snapped.
Steve was heartbroken and confused. He began crying and wailed, “Why won’t you talk to me? Why are you being this way? Please just give me a chance.”
I couldn’t tell him the truth. “Just leave me alone!” I shouted and slammed the phone back in its cradle.
The next day after rehearsal, I came outside to meet Mom for a ride home, but saw Rob’s white Trans Am idling. He hung his arm out the window with a cigarette dangling between his fingers.
“Your mom asked me to come get you.” He grinned.
I raced out to greet him and slid back into the passenger seat. As much as I liked Steve, I was more comfortable with Rob. Not only was he older, but he already knew about Dad and wasn’t afraid. He would be there to protect me.
I was back with Rob for only a week when Mom dropped another bombshell: “We’re going to be evicted.”
“Evicted? Why?”
“Excessive noise disturbance. Come on and help me pack.”
My blood boiled. I had screamed and begged for help the night my father smashed our porch light, punched holes in the walls, and broke down our front door. Not only had the neighbors heard my cries for help and chosen to ignore me, but they had complained?
Defeated, I packed up my room for another move. I was loading up boxes of books and letters when I came across a pile of college brochures and scholarship applications. Before August 15, I had planned on attending a university to major in aeronautical engineering as homage to Mom, admiring her for her work with helicopters. Aeronautical engineering could be my backup plan in case my acting career didn’t pan out. The paperwork had been overwhelming and asked detailed questions that I didn’t know how to answer, like what my parents’ income was. On the rare occasions Mom inquired about the process, I brushed her off. She never went to college, so she wouldn’t know how to fill out the forms any more than I would. “I’m working on them,” I answered and that was that. They remained incomplete.
Who am I kidding? I angrily hurled the blank applications in the trash and emptied the rest of my room. I felt hopeless and just gave up. I should have asked for help, but I didn’t know how.
Mom found a two-bedroom, two-story townhouse and applied for a lease. Before the landlord would rent to us, he checked our references and found out from our previous landlord about all the trouble David and Dad had caused. But he was sympathetic and agreed to rent to us on the condition that we not disclose our new address to either of them. Mom and I made a pact not to give our address or phone number to anyone, especially now that Dad was out of jail and free to stalk us.
Our new townhouse was in a commercial part of town with at least six auto dealerships within walking distance. On the bright side, it was just a few hundred yards from Malibu, which made it easy for me to work more shifts and hitch rides from co-workers or, in a pinch, walk home along the highway.
Since Rob stayed over on his nights off, Mom gave me the master bedroom and the king-sized bed she had once shared with Dad. But most nights Rob was required to stay in the barracks. He had requested approval to live off base, but the wait list for housing pay was long.
“The only way around it is if you get married,” Rob told me.
“Then what happens?”
“You get to move, but then they also give you housing money and dependent pay.”
“Really? They pay you to be married?”
It sounded too good to be true.
“Why don’t you wait until after you graduate from high school?” Mom asked when I approached her for permission to marry Rob. She and I were seated at a small table given to her by a friend in our new apartment building. Our old dining table was too big for the new place.
“That’s only a few months from now. The navy will pay Rob more if he’s married, and he’ll get to move off base, which means they’ll pay us housing money, too. We’re gonna get married anyway but this way we can get extra money while we live here and save for dishes and a deposit and stuff.”
It didn’t take much persuasion for her to agree. Mom had begun to rebuild her shattered life now that she was free from the stress of living in fear. David was being taken care of. Her divorce was finalized and she filed for individual Chapter 13 bankruptcy, working out payment plans with the IRS and other creditors. Whatever Dad did to pay his half was his business; she was moving onward and upward. She was even dating again. So when I—her only responsibility other than to herself—offered her a “get out of jail free” card, she took it.
Rob and I selected wedding rings at a jewelry store in North East Mall. Until our planned wedding day, I kept the band hidden in the antique metal pitcher where Mom and Dad used to stash the spare key to their bedroom. In my excitement, I shared the secret with Charity one day after play rehearsals. Too eager to wait till the official date, I wore the ring to school, which confirmed the gossip. It wasn’t long before I was questioned by one of my teachers.
As I took my seat in English class, my teacher said, “I heard a rumor, Kambri.” I could sense by the concerned look on her face that I was not going to like this conversation.
“Oh really?” I feigned ignorance. “What’s the rumor?”
“A little bird told me that you got married.”
“Really?” I laughed.
“Is that true? Did you get married?”
“No, I just got engaged, that’s all. If I did, whose business is it anyway?” I smiled and took my seat in class.
While people in my family had rallied around to help David, no one had reached out to see if I needed help—not a phone call, a letter, an offer for counseling or assistance with the college application process, nothing. I was the forgotten child. By all outward appearances, I seemed fine. I was a straight-A student, thriving at school activities and holding down a full-time job. If my own relatives didn’t worry about me, why would a teacher care if I got married? Besides, my friend Charity hadn’t believed me when I told her about what Dad had done. If anyone had thought I was going to get married they would have tried to talk me out of it, and then what? I had missed the window for applying to college in the fall, and even if I hadn’t, how would I pay for it? Every financial aid document asked about my parents’ income, which overwhelmed me. Was I supposed to count on Dad? I hadn’t seen him since I saw him jumping into his car as Mom and I sped away and he disappeared in my rearview mirror.
Rob was going to take care of me and the United States Navy was going to pay him to do it.
On a cold Friday the thirteenth, in January, between school and rehearsal for The Importance
of Being Earnest, Mom drove Rob and me to a courthouse in Fort Worth. I was gussied up in a pink long-sleeved knit dress I had worn during my senior picture shoot. I figured those could double as wedding pictures. Mom surprised me with a little white rosebud with a pink ribbon that matched my dress. The ceremony took place in a courtroom. Mom served as a witness and signed the marriage license since I, at seventeen years old, was still under the age of legal consent. As the judge gave a quick sermon about the sanctity of marriage, Mom shed a few tears and giggled at herself for being so weepy.
After a couple of quick “I do”s, a judge declared me a navy wife. Four months later I graduated from high school. My knight had rescued me and we drove off in his white Trans Am.
NEW YORK CITY
2002–2008
OVERBOARD
It was the spring of 2002, and I was sound asleep in my apartment when my telephone rang. My digital clock glowed 3:12 A.M.
“Hello?” I weakly answered, confused and groggy.
“Hi,” said a woman with a thick southern accent and gravelly smoker’s voice. “Issh thisssh Kayme-bree?”
“Yes,” I croaked.
“Hi, you don’t know me but my name is Helen and I’m here with your daddy,” she continued with deliberate formality, unaware I’d spoken to new lady friends calling on behalf of my father dozens of times over the years. Since I didn’t have a TTY, I received these early morning phone calls from various drunken women interpreting for Dad. As was usually the case, I heard his voice in the background.
I could tell Helen was signing something to him to let him know I had answered, because she whispered each word and letter, a common habit for people not skilled in ASL.
“K-A-M-B-R-I O-N telephone.”
Dad grabbed the receiver and cooed into the mouthpiece, “Kipree, luh yooo. Mih yoo, Kipree. Luh yooo.”