I’m furious. I’m terrified. I’m hopeless in some moments and strong in others.
I’m looking for someone to change my life
I’m looking for a miracle in my life
And if you could see what it’s done to me – to lose the love I knew
the land that I once knew – to learn as we grow old, the secrets of our soul
The Question – The Moody Blues
As the world was coming down at the end of a horrible summer, my sister left for boarding school. The music of the Beatles and The Moody Blues left the house. My summer fantasy concerts, singing with a fake mic in my hand to the lawn and lake out my bedroom window, finished. Time for school again. Back to my old friend circle in Austin.
Everything about the mood of the house was dark and awful. Mom would ready my lunch and make a big breakfast before we got in the Riviera for the 30 minute drive into town. I don’t really recall if my dad would leave in the boat before us or if he slept a little later. I try sometimes to recall the happy times with my dad, my own childhood memories, and I get very few neurochemical results. Nothing. I was told stories my entire life about how fun and rowdy he was before they moved back to Austin and had me.
The dad I recall was busy, away, or yelling. He had a ton of conflict inside him, even about us. That summer, he’d tried to get me to learn to water ski with everyone else. First pull, water up my nose, tears. My sister jumped in the water to talk to me. She tried to hold my ski vest the next time I tried, same result, tumbling over the front of the skis to more tears. My dad pulled the boat around aggressively and yanked me out of the water like a kitten grabbing the back of the ski vest and flopping me back in the boat. Two minutes later, amidst more tears, I was dropped on the rock outcropping in front of the house.
The rest of that summer, when I heard them talking about water skiing I would bolt into the woods behind the house. The first few times I heard my sister calling for me. After that, I was left in the peace of my stick and stone fort above the house. Safe. Well armed with weapons of war. After school started again, second grade, I would often build huge defensive battlements facing the door of my bedroom. I kept a loaded cap pistol beneath my pillow. The yells and threats of violence were coming from within the house. I made plans to jump from my bed to a position behind the army man fortress, firing my pistol at the bad guys. In my young mind, the bad guys were either robbers or Russians.
Yesterday, when my zero decided to mark himself safe with a text, he soon followed with a request for money. I ghosted the shit out of him, for fear that I would actually tell him how furious I was. Better to be quiet at this moment. Let him feel the emptiness of indifference.
His mom is still “looking forward to a report from the TA therapist.”
In second grade, I thrived at school and in sports. Coming home was a sad journey. My emotional protector and mentor was gone. My sister and brother, six and eight years older, were already breaking rules and making Dad even more crazy and Mom more hopeless. I felt alone. I spent a lot of time in the fort and roaming the back wilderness with our St. Bernard, Houston. We would adventure for entire days mapping the undeveloped properties, hunting streams, and squirrels, and princesses.
I was very alone.
My mom did her best to protect, comfort, and guide me. She was damaged and afraid herself. Her mom had died when she was only two from experimental surgeries to relieve her migraine headaches. My mom went to live with MawMaw and PopPaw, and then on to the Catholic girls school where the strict nuns gave her an early concept of good and evil and Jesus and her eventual salvation. I’m sure her prayers at this period of life were even more desperate and pleading than mine.
I prayed to some kind of God. Attended a Southern Presbyterian church with my mom, and tried to be a good boy. I spent most of my time alone after my favorite sister went back to school.
The songs I was singing that summer:
But it was Crimson and Clover and Hey Jude that reignite my memories of that last good summer. I spent a lot of time in my room singing along as my sisters and their friends were playing the hits from their bedroom. Blasting the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Bread at disco volume. Our new house was so big, my parents couldn’t hear it, and thus didn’t complain, and we rocked the back half all summer long.
I was a voyeur. As my sisters would have friends over, they would walk around in bikinis and giggle and tease me. I had a crush on all of them. My concerts, powered by their stacked and spinning 45s, were facing my bedroom window and sometimes they would all be loading the boat, a gaggle of girls in bikinis and my dad. I was protected by the reflection of the glass, but I was singing my little heart out, with both energy and imagined passion.
Ah, now I don’t hardly know her – but I think I could love her
Crimson and clover
And when she comes walking over – now I’ve been waiting to show her
Crimson and clover, over and over
Tommy James and the Shondells
Now, from this number of years past, I can marvel at the passion and intensity of my performances. I really believed the songs. I poured my heart out to this parade of young women in the yard below. Once the boat was loaded and the 45s ended, it was just me and myself for a few hours. Then the joyousness would return, the music would start up again, and we’d all be happy and dancing. Me alone in my room. The girls changing, putting on makeup, and getting ready to go out.
Doing some mental origami I can imagine how earnest my heart was as I embraced music and love song lyrics as my church. Anticipating loving a woman as a seven-year-old must be more like “I wanna hold your hand” than much of the other stuff in the songs. Then, of course, there was Best of Bread.
I may be climbing on rainbows, but baby, here it goes
Dreams, they’re for those who sleep
Life is for us to keep
And if you’re wondering what this song is leading to
I want to make it with you
I really think that we could make it girl
Make It with You – Bread
“I’d like to make it with you,” was my refrain that summer. What I really was praying for was feeling safe, feeling loved, and feeling like my world was not collapsing and on fire right around me every night my father came home from work.
I’m learning this process of mental recall is like building muscles and getting in shape. The more I dive in, play the songs, find the photographs the more the memories and neurochemical feelings sharpen in focus as they are replayed by my holographic memory. A song dredged up from my past by Spotify, if I pay attention, can unlock previously unlit wings of the museum.
Deep inside my mind, I am sad again, singing a love song to my dead sister’s memory, and driving home to face the bullshit of my son.
Is he trying to make us suffer along with him? Or is this just the place he’s existing, surviving, brain muddled from a continuous stream of benzos now removed? One is cloud nine fog of “fuck it” and “there’s no problem.” Today, I won’t know until he pings back in. I offered him money for the planting chore he has been putting off for weeks. I’ll water the four honeysuckle vines today, so they don’t die.
They are waiting for him. I am not.
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