How to Grow an Addict

by J. A. Wright

  It wasn’t like she just sat around all day reading; she’d had a job at a bank for as long as I could remember. She told me once she worked at the county courthouse but she quit that job after a case about a man who murdered his wife with a hammer. She said it was too upsetting to be in the same room with criminals all day so she took a job at an insurance company after Robbie started school, as a claims processor, but then she quit because her boss was “a nasty piece of work.” She started working at the bank when I started second grade but I don’t think she liked it. “My job is very boring but it pays the bills and I don’t mind working ten-hour days Monday to Thursday because I love having Fridays off,” she said.

  That was the day she’d get her hair and nails done and do the weekly shopping.

  Every Friday, for years, until I was about fourteen, she’d pick me up after school so I could go shopping with her, and we’d drive all the way across town to the Piggly Wiggly. It was the most expensive store in town, but she said it was the best store in town and refused to go anywhere else. When Dad questioned her about it, she said, “It’s clean, their fruit is fresh, and you can’t get better service from a butcher than the one at Piggly Wiggly.”

  Shopping with Mom was always a big chore for me and a good time for her. Before heading for the back of the store to see the butcher, she’d hand me a list and a pen, all the while touching up her makeup and straightening her clothes. I’d spend my time running from aisle to aisle filling up the cart with the things she wanted, and just about the time I’d head for the checkout counter Mom would appear with a big smile on her face. “Okay, I’m ready to go, hope we got everything,” she’d say.

  I followed her once to see what was so interesting about the butcher. I hid behind a display of Fig Newtons so I could listen to them without being seen. He was a lot younger than Dad, and not as tall or handsome. When he saw Mom walking his way he stopped what he was doing, stood up straight, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Wow, you’re exceptionally lovely today.”

  She giggled and waved her arm in the air. After that, their conversation never moved past questions about different cuts of meats and his new meat slicer. I felt weird listening and watching them, mainly because she acted so silly, playing with her hair, swaying to the elevator music coming from the walls of the store, and leaning on the glass cabinet like she was a movie star.

  She really liked the butcher. She even brought him gifts, including a cassette tape of one of her favorite singers, Barry Manilow. She was so excited about giving it to him. “Do you think it’s the kind of music a butcher would listen to?” she asked on the drive to the Piggly Wiggly.

  “I don’t know, Mom. It’s not the kind of music Dad would listen to, but he’s not a butcher,” I replied.

  “We don’t talk about Dad on Fridays, remember?” she said, gently slapping my leg a few times.

  “Oh yeah, forgot!” I laughed.

  CHAPTER 5

  I started the fourth grade with a cast on my ankle because I fell into Dad’s mechanic pit when I was helping him rotate his truck tires. It only hurt for a few days, and I had a nice new pair of crutches. I think the attention I got from my new teacher and the other students helped to distract me from thinking about Tammy when I was at school.

  Having a cast and crutches didn’t stop me from doing things like shopping with Mom. I liked helping her; it made her happy, and when she was happy she was especially nice to be around. Besides, being able to shop unattended had its advantages. I could eat candy while I shopped and I could easily put things in the cart that weren’t on the shopping list without Mom noticing. That’s how I got my collection of extracts and flavorings.

  I came up with the idea—chewing on flavored toothpicks instead of biting my nails—at the beginning of fourth grade. It only took a few weeks to get a collection started. I began with the usuals—vanilla, brandy, maple, orange, and rum—and by the time Halloween rolled around, I had twenty-six extracts in various-size bottles and different brands. I kept them in a small sideboard cabinet Mom bought from Mrs. Benson’s garage sale and put in my bedroom because it didn’t fit in the hallway. I usually added a few drops of an extract flavor to a can of 7 Up when I got home from school, but mostly I liked to soak toothpicks in extracts for a day before I would chew on them. Coconut and maple were my favorites, and I learned not to chew on rum or brandy toothpicks at school after my teacher thought I smelled funny one day and took me out into the hall to talk to me.

  “You smell like you’ve been drinking rum,” she said.

  “I haven’t,” I replied, and I pointed to my locker. “Here I’ll show you.”

  I opened my locker door so she could inspect it. I showed her my Tupperware container and opened it so she could see my ten toothpicks soaking in the rum extract I’d poured over them that morning.

  “Why do you need to chew on toothpicks, Randall?”

  I reluctantly put my right hand out, palm down, so she could see my fingernails.

  “Oh, well I guess chewing on toothpicks is better than doing that to your nails. But try another flavor, one that doesn’t smell like booze, and just bring one or two toothpicks to school, not a whole bowl of them,” she said.

  I walked back into class and everyone grumbled. “Did you get a whack on the butt?” I heard Katie snicker.

  Dad didn’t like my toothpicks either. When he saw me in the living room watching TV with one in my mouth he said, “Why are you doing that? You look more stupid than ever.”

  “My teacher said it was okay,” I replied.

  “Your teacher is a dumbshit!” he said.

  He told Mom she’d better get a handle on me before it was too late. “It’s better than watching her chew her nails all day,” she argued. “I’m sick and tired of trying to get the bloodstains out of her shirtsleeves and off the living room furniture.”

  I was always grateful that Mom kept a supply of Band-Aids in the bathroom and that she never yelled at me about using so many, especially when I went through a particularly bad phase and had to put two Band-Aids on every finger before I went to school. Occasionally, when I wasn’t paying attention to hiding my hands and my fingers were visible, she’d have a quick look at them and say something like, “Those must hurt pretty bad, huh?” I usually got embarrassed and pulled my hands away real fast. But sometimes I’d nod in agreement. “Yeah, they hurt a lot,” I’d say.

  A week after I got the cast off my ankle, Dad discovered two chewed-up toothpicks, and a few bloodstains, on the backseat of his Mustang. At the car show the next weekend I heard him tell his friend Mike he was going to break me of my bad habits once and for all. He made me get rid of all my toothpicks and extracts and started inspecting my hands every morning at breakfast. If he could tell I’d been biting them, he’d yell at me until I cried, and then he’d yell at Mom, which always made me feel bad because she was getting in trouble for something I couldn’t stop doing. Mom usually stuck up for me, even though she thought nail biting was a gross habit and wanted me to make more of an effort to stop.

  “If she had some motherly direction and a few constructive things to do, I bet she’d stop doing it,” he said.

  Mom agreed with him and invited Olive over to show me how to knit, crochet, and hook a rug. All of those things did keep my hands busy, and I didn’t bite my nails for two whole weeks. But after that I started biting them again for some reason, and in no time at all I figured out how to crochet or knit and bite my nails at the same time. The blood was pretty noticeable on the scarf I made for Olive, but I gave it to her anyway.

  After Dad noticed I could knit and bite at the same time, he took me to the doctor. “You need your head examined,” he said.

  When the doctor came into the exam room Dad stood up, shook his hand, and said, ‘Listen, Doc, the girl’s had ants in her pants and fingers in her mouth since she was born. She’s a bit slow.”

  The doctor crinkled up his nose and forehead. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr. Grange, and
I’ll have a little talk with Randall,” he said.

  He turned around to face the examination table where I was sitting, “I know you probably don’t want to show me, but can I have a look, please?” he asked, motioning to my hands.

  I pulled my hands from my jacket pockets, and I was glad he didn’t ask me to take all the Band-Aids off. He looked at my left middle finger and said, “Do you bite them more in the morning or night?” he asked.

  “In the afternoon,” I replied.

  “Why do you think that is? Are you hungry in the afternoon?”

  I was going to tell him I wasn’t sure when I heard Dad say, “Look at her, she’s twelve years old and a little pig, she can’t be hungry.”

  “I’m not twelve, Dad; I’m nine,” I said, really softly so he wouldn’t get mad.

  The doctor turned to Dad really quick and in very flat, calm voice he said, “She’s not slow, she’s not fat, and she probably bites her nails because she’s scared. Millions of people bite their nails, and she might grow out of it or she might not. Maybe she’ll learn to paint or draw instead? I’d stop making a big deal out of it if I were you,” he said as he looked over and smiled at me.

  The doctor took a pen out of his jacket and a piece of paper from a folder he brought into the room with him that had my name on it. “This guy is great with kids, and I’d be happy to set up an appointment for Randall,” he said as he handed the piece of paper to Dad.

  Dad stared at the paper for a minute while the doctor wrote something else in my folder. “I could give her something to calm her down but I really think it would be better if she saw the doctor I just gave you the number for,” he said.

  “I’ll think about it, but if she’s not slow then she’s just plain lazy, and no shrink can do a thing about lazy,” Dad said.

  The drive home was scary. We were in Dad’s Falcon, and he drove like a maniac. I didn’t talk. I just sat still in the backseat and tried not to look up at the rearview mirror because I knew he was looking back at me to see if I had a finger in my mouth.

  I stared at the floor and thought about Dad telling the doctor I was lazy. It was the same thing he said about Mom all the time. He didn’t like the way she kept the house, and he was always complaining about her cooking. He had lots of ideas about what she should do and how she should think, and he was always saying mean things about her friends and her boss. Dad hated her boss, and ever since the day he found out Mom got a ride to work with him after her car broke down he wouldn’t stop talking about it and asking her to find a new job. He’d go on for hours about her ‘faggy’ boss and how much mom liked fags. I’d get so angry with him for being so mean to her but I couldn’t do anything except go to my room and play music or cover my head with a pillow.

  I don’t know when I started wanting him to die, but it had become my daily, sometimes hourly, prayer by the time I’d met my sister Tammy. “Go, please go, die, please die.” Just saying it over and over in my head made me feel better.

  I liked what the doctor said about me taking up painting. So when Dad pulled the car into his big garage, I said, “Maybe you could help me learn to paint, you’re always painting cars.”

  “That’s not painting. And I’m not an artist or your teacher,” he replied.

  “What about your tattoos?” I asked.

  “They’re not art. They’re tattoos,” he said as he got out the car.

  Dad had five tattoos. He got them all in Saigon. Three of them were the names and dates of his buddies who died in the war and the largest was an American eagle on his left shoulder. But the most interesting was his tattoo of a naked woman, posed like one of those women you see on the mud flaps of semi trucks, on his right bicep. When Dad flexed his arm her boobs got bigger. Mom didn’t like that tattoo, but I thought it was cool and he seemed to get a kick out of showing it off.

  A week after the doctor’s appointment Mom enrolled me in a Saturday art class at a little school a few miles from my house. I knew a few of the kids in the class; they were all about my age. The school was too far to walk, so Mom took me and picked me up for the first two weeks.

  The third week it was Dad’s turn for pickup. He had to come into the classroom to get me because we were running late and he didn’t want to wait outside in the car for me any longer. It was a warm day for November, and Dad was wearing one of his sleeveless T-shirts. One of the girls in my class said something about how many tattoos he had, and that’s when he flexed his bicep so that she could see the boobs on the woman get bigger. She thought it was cool, but the teacher didn’t.

  “Why would you show that to anyone, let alone a group of kids? You should be ashamed of yourself,” she told him.

  I was embarrassed and Dad was pissed off. On the drive home he said I should quit the class. “You’re in real danger of becoming a moron, just like that teacher of yours,” he said.

  “I don’t want to quit. I like the teacher and the other kids, and they like me. Besides, I’m in the middle of making something really cool,” I replied.

  “Not possible,” he grumbled under his breath, as he lit a Pall Mall.

  I didn’t tell him the something I was making was his Christmas present.

  I’d made a few gifts before, but nothing as good as the hooked rug I was working on in my art class. I spent weeks thinking about it, got Uncle Hank to help me copy the Ford Mustang logo design I found in one of Dad’s car magazines, and bought a dark, tan-colored yarn for the base and black yarn to spell out the word “Mustang.” I finished it a week before Christmas and was so pleased with myself that I showed everyone I knew, including Mrs. Benson.

  “It’s perfect,” she said. “I sure hope your dad appreciates all the hard work you’ve put into it.”

  On Christmas morning I was the first one up. After I got my cereal and started a pot of coffee for Mom and Dad, I went out to the living room to see if there were any gifts on the fireplace mantel for me. We never had a Christmas tree, Dad wouldn’t allow it, so Mom and I used the fireplace mantel to put gifts on and we usually decorated it with lights and Christmas ornaments.

  There were only three presents for me, and four for Robbie, but I didn’t care because mine were big and I knew I had a few more waiting for me at Aunt Flo’s and Uncle Hank’s— and besides, I was more excited about the presents I’d made for Mom and Dad.

  Robbie opened his presents when he got up at about eleven, and then he took off with his friends. It was almost noon when Mom and Dad walked into the living room; I’d already unwrapped, examined, and rewrapped all my presents. I tried on my new boots, played around with the cassette player/recorder, and wondered if Mom realized she’d bought me Barrel of Monkeys the year before. I’d thought about it for a couple of hours and decided not to say anything to her, and that I’d act surprised and happy about it because I could always give it away to someone at school.

  After Mom and Dad got their coffee and sat down in the living room, I handed them their gifts. I watched Mom open hers and hold up all four of the silk-screened dishtowels I’d made for her. “These are beautiful honey, thank you,” she said.

  Dad opened his, too, but only after he finished his coffee and cigarette. He looked at the front and back of the rug. “Did you make it or buy it?” he asked.

  “Made it all by myself. Sketched out the design, picked out the yarn colors and hooked the entire thing. It should fit perfectly in the back window of your Mustang,” I replied.

  “Think so, do you?” he said, and then went outside to his big garage.

  We drove to Aunt Flo’s and Uncle Hank’s for Christmas dinner at about 4 p.m. in Dad’s Mustang. Uncle Hank was in the driveway wearing a Santa hat and a beard when we arrived. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said as we pulled up. With his accent it sounded more like “Hi, hi, hi.” Both Mom and I laughed.

  I gathered up my gifts for Uncle Hank and Aunt Flo and had just started to get out of the car when I noticed Dad pointing to the back window and Uncle Hank leaning in to have a look. “Wow,
that looks really nice there in the window, perfect fit. She did a great job,” Uncle Hank said as he leaned in a bit further so I could see his entire face smile at me.

  “Best present she’s ever given me,” Dad replied.

  CHAPTER 6

  Robbie got an acceptance letter in the mail from the college Dad had picked out for him a few weeks before he graduated from high school. Mom and Dad made me go to his graduation ceremony even though I told Mom a few times I shouldn’t have to go because Robbie had refused to attend my tenth birthday party the week before.

  “Boys don’t like birthday parties, especially girly ones with pink cupcakes and screaming ten-year-olds,” Mom said.

  Even though only four of my friends came, it turned out okay, especially after Olive and Ken and Ken’s friend Ron showed up at the skating rink. They brought their custom made white leather skates and taught my friends and me how to turn around and skate backward.

  The next day we went to Robbie’s graduation, and because he was class president and had to give a big speech, we had to sit in the front row. I must admit, Robbie did look handsome when he walked up on stage, and I felt proud of him for a few minutes. I didn’t understand much about his speech, though. It was something about life being easier for losers than winners because winning hurts. At the end of his speech he told everyone he was off to college to get a degree in “poli sci” (whatever that was) so he could become a congressman or the state’s attorney general.