Diary of a Misfit, page 9
Chapter Four
(1982–1992)
ONCE, WHEN I WAS young and trying to prolong the moments before bedtime, I asked my mother to describe Heaven. We were devoted Christians then, and we talked about the afterlife as if it were as real as Walmart, a warp world just a level above or below us. My mom tugged my twin-sized sheets up to my neck. She kissed my nose, then described the path to what she called the pearly gates.
“When we die,” she said, “we leave our bodies behind. Only our spirit goes to heaven.”
She told me my soul would slip through my chest, float up through the clouds, then land in front of Saint Peter and his giant tome of judgment. “When you get there, he’ll flip through the Book of Life until he finds your name. He’ll look at everything good and bad you’ve ever done, and he will decide if you should take your place among the angels.”
I wiggled under my Holly Hobbie sheets, imagining the ascent and Peter’s big book. I wondered if its holy pages would show the times I screamed at my little brother, if Peter would know I called the 1-900 wrestling hotline, racked up a five-hundred-dollar phone bill, then lied to my mom and said a kid down the road had broken in and used our phone. I’d prayed and asked God to forgive me for those sins, but did that mean they’d disappeared? I still hadn’t told my mom I’d lied. Maybe Peter would use that as evidence to keep me out of heaven.
“And then what happens?” I asked.
“If you get in, you’ll walk the streets of gold.”
I wanted my mom to sit on my bed a little while longer, so I asked all the questions my seven-year-old brain could conjure. Did God build the streets out of gold bars or gold nuggets? Did he arrange the pieces like cobblestones? Did they stick up in rocky crags that scratched the angels’ feet?
“No, baby,” my mom told me. “The gold is smooth. Everyone glides along barefoot and singing hallelujah.”
She turned off my light, and I imagined Heaven’s glow. I asked if we would still live next to the same people in the afterlife. I didn’t want to spend forever with that neighbor boy. I didn’t want him to bring up the wrestling hotline in front of Saint Peter.
“I don’t know,” my mom told me. “But I do know everyone gets a mansion.”
I closed my eyes and imagined a gigantic house on an open plot of land. I told my mom I would fill my mansion with Barbie dolls and the American Gladiators figurines my little brother and I collected. I’d have a pool in the backyard and a porch swing in the front.
“You and me can drink coffee there,” I said. “With lots of milk. Every morning, we’ll swing and watch the hummingbirds.”
She didn’t say anything, and I kicked the covers off, worried that my vision of paradise didn’t sound appealing. “Or we can just read,” I said. “We don’t have to look at the birds. They have books in Heaven, right?”
My mom exhaled, then smoothed the sheets back down. She called me “baby.” Her voice turned serious.
“When we get to Heaven, I won’t be your mother anymore.”
All the heat in my body rushed to my head. I asked my mom to repeat herself, but I covered my ears so I wouldn’t hear her say it again. Still, I could make out every muffled word.
“I won’t be your mother.”
My bedroom didn’t have curtains, and I worried my mom would see my face in the moonlight, so I pulled the sheets back over my head and hid as the first few tears slipped down my cheeks. I tried to take a deep breath, but my lungs seized up. I could feel the fear in my throat.
“No,” I said, from under the covers. “That doesn’t make sense. You have to be my mom.”
I cried long wails, and my mom cried, too. I begged her to tell me she was lying. She pulled me into her arms, and I cried until my sheets were sweaty and her neck was soaked with snot and tears.
“Please, Mama, I don’t want to go to Heaven. I don’t want to spend forever without you.”
I don’t remember how long she held me, but it felt like we both cried till daylight. I promised to be good if she’d take it all back. She told me it wasn’t punishment, just God’s will. He wanted everyone to love each other equally in Heaven, she said, so there couldn’t be any special relationships. She wouldn’t be my dad’s wife. She wouldn’t be my grandma’s daughter. She wouldn’t be my little brother’s mom, and she wouldn’t be mine.
I woke up the next morning puffy-eyed and afraid. I didn’t ask my mother if it was different in Hell, if the trade-off for burning was recognizing everyone on fire next to you. But I feared the afterlives equally after that night. When our preacher talked about Heaven, I didn’t imagine mansions or gold or Saint Peter. Without my mother, I knew, Heaven would be as miserable as Hell.
* * *
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I DON’T REMEMBER A time in my life before church, but my mother did not grow up devout. Her parents were part-time Christians, weak believers who spoke about God in the dry, generic way many people in the South do—constantly, but without real conviction. My grandparents knew the Lord’s Prayer, and they believed in Heaven, but my mom grew up thinking God was little more than an old man with a big red pen. He lived on the outskirts of her imagination. Then Cam Milton died, and my mom turned to God in a desperation she later described as hope.
My mom told me over and over again when I was young that Cam was the only person who understood her. I hated hearing about the boy she loved more than my dad, but my mother talked about Cam anyway. They met on the first day of sixth grade, when a football Cam threw long hit my mom on the head. She was Rhonda Carter then, and new to Delhi. Though my grandma always described Delhi as the most important place in her life, she left a few years after she moved there from Frog Island. She met my grandfather at the edge of Hell Street in 1955. Then, when he joined the army, they moved to El Paso, Texas, and Lawton, Oklahoma, before settling down for a few years in Germany. My mom was born in 1964 in Oklahoma, the fourth of my grandma’s five children, and she did most of her elementary schooling in Germany on an army base called Bad Tölz. When my grandpa retired in 1975, he told my grandma they could move anywhere. She said she wanted to go back to the first city she’d loved. She wanted to return to Delhi.
My mom enrolled at Delhi Middle School that January. She was nosy, so she was looking around as she approached the building, but she didn’t see Cam until his football skidded across her face. She fell into the dirt. Cam rushed over to help, and when my mom looked up, she was too spellbound to care about the welt forming below her eye. Cam was handsome and skinny, with a long face and deep brown eyes. My mom told me she loved him immediately.
Cam played golf and basketball, but he was also an intellectual, the only Delhi student who made straight A’s every report card. My mom was one of a handful of kids who regularly earned a spot on the honor roll, and her idea of a perfect day was hiding in the closet and reading three or four books. Cam liked to read, too. He kept a journal and wrote my mom long notes. They joined the Beta Club and the yearbook staff together, and for a while, they were next-door neighbors one street east of Chatham. My mom told me she spent most afternoons staring out the kitchen window of her family’s single-wide trailer, waiting for Cam to appear. He was one of the few people in Delhi who never called her white trash. Other people gossiped about my mom’s drunk father and her runaway sister, but Cam never treated my mom as an extension of what other people considered a wayward family. He saw a bookworm with unlimited potential.
Sometimes my mom and Cam dated, but mostly they were best friends. Before Cam died, my mom considered the biggest heartbreak of her life to be the day he asked Cindy Homan out. By the end of their senior year, my mom and Cam were “together” enough that he agreed to take her to prom. She saved all spring to pay for a dress. She worked doubles at the Jitney Jungle grocery store, and she babysat for extra money. By early May, she had enough. She skipped school one Friday and drove to Monroe to buy a gown worthy of the boy she loved. She picked out something modest but lacy, a purple floor-length, and as she carried it in clear plastic through the Pecanland Mall, she saw someone she knew from Delhi. The friend waved her down, and my mom walked over, smiling until she got close enough to see the pain on her friend’s face.
“Cam died,” the girl said. “He shot himself.”
My mom often talked about Cam’s funeral when I was growing up. He died May 7, 1982, a few weeks before the end of her senior year. Three pastors preached at his service, she told me, and just before the graveyard workers lowered Cam’s casket into the ground, a heavy branch fell off an oak tree and knocked my mom unconscious. She left the funeral in an ambulance. An emergency room doctor prescribed her first Percocet, and the pill filled her with a woozy relief.
My mom spent a few days in the hospital. One evening, she was watching TV, flipping through the channels, when she stopped on Pat Robertson’s show, The 700 Club. Robertson was a folksy preacher and a keen media mogul, and The 700 Club was his daily talk show. (He later ran an unsuccessful bid for president.) Each episode of The 700 Club was like a news program mixed with a revival. Robertson interviewed guests, and he preached a rousing sermon. He would claim miracles in the name of Jesus, then announce that God had told him that someone in the television audience had just been healed of hemorrhoids or cancer. My mom watched the evangelist from her hospital bed, and she decided to give praying a shot. She asked God for solace, and she begged him to let Cam into Heaven. She worried then, and for many years after, that suicide was the kind of unforgivable sin God refused to ignore. But she prayed, hoping God worked miracles retroactively. She told herself that maybe Cam had repented right after he pulled the trigger, that he’d made it past Saint Peter, and she’d see him in Heaven someday.
When my mom got out of the hospital, she prayed and searched for the same kind of relief the Percocet had provided, but whispering into the void did not transport her the way she hoped it would. She tossed around in bed, blaming herself for not filling whatever holes Cam felt in his life.
A week after Cam died, my mom decided she couldn’t stand to live in Delhi without him, so she moved forty-five minutes west to live with her older sister Ann in Monroe. She met my dad in a park that weekend. He was drunk, and she was heartbroken. My dad wobbled back to his car holding an emptied case of beer, and he found my mom sitting on the hood, looking out at nothing.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you cook?”
My mom turned around and tried to make sense of my dad, a lanky white teenager with a curly Afro and hazel eyes she thought looked lonely.
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you smoke?” My mom shook her head no, and my dad smiled. That was the right answer. He stepped closer, and she could smell the beer he’d been drinking all day.
“Do you want to go out Friday night?” he asked.
My parents spent their first date in Delhi, in Cam’s kitchen, talking to Cam’s mother while the rest of my mom’s classmates got ready for prom. My mom watched as her friends spilled out from a back bedroom, dressed in taffeta, happy despite the circumstances. She and my dad lingered in the kitchen long after everyone was gone. Eventually, Cam’s mom said she was ready for bed. My dad didn’t have rhythm or a tuxedo, but when they left Cam’s house, he asked my mom if he could take her to the dance. He drove her home so she could put on the dress she’d bought for Cam, then they sped down Main Street, a boy and his grieving date. They didn’t take pictures that night, so I’ve never seen the dress or the khakis and polo shirt my dad wore, but when I was a kid, my parents told me their clothes didn’t matter. What they remembered was the music. As soon as they stepped into the gymnasium, my mom grabbed my dad, then she held him close through “Endless Love.”
As a kid, I always thought theirs sounded like the weirdest first date ever. Who takes a girl to her dead boyfriend’s house? But my dad was an only child whose parents rarely spent time with him. He was hungry for any kind of love.
After the dance, my dad dropped my mom off at her parents’ house. He walked her to the door, and she lingered on the steps while her father flicked the porch light off and on. My dad cleared his throat.
“This is the part I’ve been dreading my whole life,” he told my mom. “I’ve never kissed anyone.”
My mom leaned in, stole a quick peck, then hurried inside before she could see my dad’s reaction. I don’t know if they were in love or just lonely enough to tell themselves they were, but they hung out every day after that, and by August, my mom was pregnant with me. They were both eighteen.
Neither of their families offered to help buy the things a baby would need. My mom’s parents were perennially broke, and my dad’s were stingy. His parents had good jobs and a steady stream of side income they earned off the mineral rights their parents secured when prospectors first found oil in Louisiana, but they didn’t give my parents any money when my mom got pregnant.
In a way, my dad was happy. He was free to start a new family on his own. He didn’t earn much driving a delivery truck for Coca-Cola, but he promised my mom he’d work extra shifts so she could focus on college. He’d never excelled in school, but he knew my mom longed to keep studying. She loved math and dreamed of becoming a nurse or an accountant, a career woman with a bachelor’s degree. That fall, she registered for classes at the local university, but when she arrived the first week, a guidance counselor told her she couldn’t attend. It didn’t matter that she’d already been accepted, or that she’d made the honor roll every semester in high school. The college didn’t want pregnant students, the guidance counselor said. My mom left the campus and started working at the fast-food restaurant Hardee’s instead. “A dream job,” she told me when I was young. “I was the chocolate chip cookie and salad girl.”
I asked her all the time when I was little if she regretted choosing me over college. I knew by the way she talked about school that she was smart enough to have become anything she wanted. She’d scored two points shy of perfect on the ACT, and she used big words like “mellifluous” and “transmogrify.” I knew, because I’d read in her high school journal, that she loved physics and trigonometry and planned to take both in college. But every time I asked, she’d make a face and shake her head as if she hadn’t thought twice about keeping me. “Being a mom is the best thing I’ve ever done,” she’d tell me, conveniently wording her response so as not to address the things she didn’t do. I always dropped it, knowing in my heart that she was disappointed in ways she couldn’t tell me. Not only had she missed out on college, but she had to spend her life with my dad, a guy who’d misspelled “parents” as “parnets” in the first letter he wrote to her.
My mom was three months pregnant when she married my dad in November 1982. Cam had been dead six months. My mom woke up that day ill with morning sickness, and when she tried to recite her vows at a country church on the highway between Delhi and Monroe, she threw up on the preacher. My parents had to sit to say “I do.”
They didn’t go on a honeymoon because they only had thirteen dollars between them after the ceremony. Instead, they used a buy-one-get-one-free Burger King coupon to celebrate with two Whoppers and a single Coke. They survived the rest of the month on a bag of rice and a pound of potatoes. They spent most of their time in a decrepit one-bedroom apartment with a view of the grassy levee that protects West Monroe from the Ouachita River. They pretended their complex was a country club, and they told each other that apartment “I” stood for “in love,” but they grew restless after a few weeks inside. Looking for free entertainment that winter, they started going to church.
They flipped through the phone book, picking out the congregations with the biggest ads. They spent a few Sundays with the Methodists sitting upright on hard pews. They tried the Baptist church that my mom’s algebra teacher attended, and they yawned between the droning hymns. Then, one weekend in January 1983, they visited a Pentecostal-style evangelical church, and my mom believed she’d found the thing that would distract her from her grief.
My mom could tell, as soon as she and my dad took seats in the back, that the church was different. The choir performed as if they were a rock band with guitars. The pastor shimmied around the pulpit, punctuating scriptures with leg kicks and tiny dances. His was the kind of sermon Pat Robertson preached on TV. In the audience, people closed their eyes and raised their hands, and they prayed in an incomprehensible language that made my mother believe they’d surrendered everything, even their capacity for speech, to God. She watched in envy. At the end of the service, she staggered toward the altar and asked God to take her pain away.
That May, a year and twelve days after Cam died, my mom gave birth to me. She told me later that she prayed when she first held me. She asked God to turn her into a tower of strength, and she promised she would raise me to believe in Him. A few years later, when my brother, Dustin, was a newborn, my mom sat me down and explained that as long as I was a Christian, I would never feel alone.
“God is a wonderful friend,” she told me. “He loves you even when you feel unlovable.”
We never missed a church service when I was young, and we always tossed a handful of dollar bills into the offering plate as it passed our row. The preacher said God would reward anyone who tithed—not just in Heaven with a mansion, but here, on earth. God would reach through the clouds, the pastor said, and pour out so much money that the tithers wouldn’t even have space to store it all.
My family needed that blessing. When I was born, oil profits accounted for nearly half of Louisiana’s state budget, and when the price per barrel plummeted in the mid-1980s, the state’s economy collapsed. By 1986, one in eight Louisiana workers was unemployed, the highest rate in the nation. My mom lost her job at Hardee’s. She tried to open her own daycare, but no one else had money to spend, either. My dad kept his job, but he earned only $110 a week driving a truck for Coke, so we lived off rice and gravy in a wood-frame house my dad’s grandmother owned. It was drafty and old, painted in a peeling gray whose flecks worked their way into everything. When I was young, my mother talked about our poverty as if it were some failing of my father’s. He wrote hot checks to keep the lights on, she told me. He pawned their wedding rings to cover the checks. I remember waiting in the car with her while he slinked into a pay-day loan agency, trading what last bit of shame he had for money to buy the rings back, but I didn’t understand then that there were forces greater than one man’s bad decisions. He was the head of our house, my mother taught me, and that meant he was supposed to provide.
