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The next day, we floated back over the border to Uncle John and Aunt Mae’s, and as promised, I slept in a bed with my Uncle Mike and I learned what it was like to work construction at 11 and a half years old. I learned how to sit in the back of a truck with angry men three times my size wearing Pendleton shirts and how to be very quiet. I learned that when you got to the work site it was important to keep moving, and how to crawl under a house and keep touching things to make it look like you were working. I learned that when your Uncle John is running a little hot and attempts to back a Ditch Witch off of a trailer, and mistakenly embeds the trenching blades into a tree and guts that tree in front of all the other workers...that somehow, it is your fault, and that when he tells you to get into a rowboat, over there on the edge of the work site near the pond—you do it...even though you've never even been near a rowboat in your life, and you just start “rowing” because Uncle John told you to and you got the feeling that he couldn’t stand the sight of you. I learned that when you come around a corner, and you see these lily pads, and there is a light rain falling and there's mist coming off the water, and in the middle of those lily pads, there's a swan—I learned that when swans turn very slowly, and lock eyes with you, and then go, Caaah! that means they’re just about to attack you, and I learned that swans, as beautiful as they are, are not F-ing around and really make no distinction between you and the boat you’re in and so they repeatedly hammer the side of the metal hull with their beak like a machine gun until you suddenly learn that you can row, actually, you can row really fast. Whoooo!
We stayed with Uncle John and Aunt Mae for a very short and a very long month. While we were gone, we learned that our mother had left the Travelodge, and had moved us to a remote suburban frontier outpost on the far edge of town, on the border between Mission Viejo and what would eventually become Aliso Viejo, still a Viejo, mind you, which means OLD, but we were moving into the NEW World condominiums. New World...no shit. We now lived so far out into the open grasslands that surrounded all things Viejo, we were considered “On The Menu” should a lioness wander off the nearby animal preserve; home to the horrible tiger mauling, the violent chimp attack, the hippo standoff with the super sad ending and the Asian elephant that crushed a game warden, escaped the facility and was finally dramatically captured as she attempted to enter the 405 freeway.
The day we arrived at the condo, there was no one home. The front door was unlocked and all the windows were open. Our few belongings were scattered amongst fast food wrappers and it looked like our mother had been kidnapped after a brief struggle and a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Later that day, Frank and my mom finally rolled up, both looking a little worse for wear. Frank told us they had gone to the hospital because Mom had taken a lot of pills in the hopes that she wouldn’t wake up, but that she was “okay” now. She stayed “okay” for about the next two months, then suddenly told us that she was planning to fly to Texas, to go live and be “okay” with her friend, Gloria. Sheila and I were told we were going to be “okay,” because Dad would be coming to live with us, which it turns out, was not “okay” with our dad because he already had some sweet digs, sleeping on a cot under a drafting table with a handgun, and so we were now going to be totally “okay,” living on our own at age 12 and 15, which was not “okay” at all with our 19 year old sister Lisa, who we found out later, had been attempting for some time to win custody of us, but because she was so young, they wouldn't let her do it. Okay?
So, as soon as Mom headed to Texas, it was back to Mission Viejo proper for me and Sheila, where we moved in with her best friend, another Lisa and her family. Presiding over it all was Lisa’s mother Dee, a loving and reserved steady hand, who my father, with a lump in his throat, would forever refer to as “a living saint.” We would also be living with Valerie and Vanessa, the twins who were my age and Dee's steady boyfriend, Howard, who repaired conveyor belts at egg factories. I slept on their couch for about the first month, next to their stand-up piano in the living room, and then eventually, I graduated to the room just off the utility porch, sleeping on sort of a fold-out-couch, but compared to the rollaway bed with the bar in my back, the top bunk at the hippie hotel and sharing the sheets with my Uncle Mike, it might as well have been a suite at The Ritz-Carlton.
After a short stint in Galveston, we learned that our mother had a reservation for the “flight deck” at UCLA. She was going to be staying there for a while, and we were told she’d be working with a psychologist named Shirley, who would eventually teach my mom how to say, “I'm terrific. I like me. I'm good people.” We would go and visit Mom, where she was staying in a campus dorm room while she was in treatment, double majoring in Shame and Low Self-Esteem. She would sit on the edge of the bed in her little cell, feet not touching the floor and insist “I'm terrific. I like me. I'm good people” but we could tell she wasn’t buying it. I just remember my mother seeming very small and terribly embarrassed by it all.
After six months, Mom “graduated” from the psyche ward at UCLA, and moved in with some family friends in Los Angeles, sort of an unofficial halfway house until she could get on her feet again. Another six months passed and it was finally time for her to come home and take another run at this thing. In order to stay on brand, we would now be living on the other edge of town, on a street called Via Damasco, which wasn’t as far out as the previous Condo of the Damned, but far out enough to be situated next to a meandering, overgrown ditch with a creek running through it. When Mom came home and the three of us were suddenly living together again, Sheila and I wondered if things would ever be the same. But very shortly after we moved in, Mom gave us a note and told us there was a 7-11 at the corner and we didn’t even have to read it, we knew what it said. We walked the note up to the 7-11, put it on the counter, the guy opened it and it read: “Please give my children two packages of Benson and Hedges Menthol, Maureen Devlin, 837-7464.” Benson and Hedges Menthol?...things were looking up. Mom had forsaken the deadly Lucky Strikes. Maybe “I'm terrific, I like me, I'm good people” was finally taking hold after all. After making a few trips to 7-11 over the following days, Sheila took me aside and told me “I don't think I want to do this anymore. I don't want to buy cigarettes for Mom. They're bad for her.” She told our mother this, and Mom seemed to understand. She understood enough that from that day forward the note read, “Please give my son two packages of Benson and Hedges Menthol. Thank you, Maureen Devlin. 837-7464,” but after a little while, I confessed to Sheila “I don't think I want to do this either. This isn't good for Mom. Cigarettes are bad for her.” So, the next time she gave me the note, I told my mom that I wasn’t going to go buy her cigarettes anymore. I remember she quietly took the note back and folded it, put it down on the table, looked up and dragging on her last cigarette, said: “That's OK honey. You know what? I'll go up the street, and I'll get my own cigarettes…and I hope when I do, that I'm hit by a fuckin’ truck” and that’s when we knew she was back. Our old mom was back.
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