Chapter Twenty-Nine
-- June, 2002
Pink Floyd – “In the Flesh”
Jesse was having a sleepover at our house, so after we ate dinner, Mom said she’d drop me off at Eddie’s. It would be one of the rare times I went over to Bill and Beth’s voluntarily. Though I was glad to get out of the house. Mom had been on the warpath recently. Pete was suing her in an effort to pay less in child support.
Once at Eddie’s though, it became clear that this wasn’t a good night to visit. His parents were in a bad way. Eddie hurried me into his room and shut the door. Almost immediately his mother came pounding asking if we wanted anything to eat. Eddie calmly opened the door an inch and told her “no thanks.”
She went away and we played a helicopter video game until a few minutes later when there came yet another knock at the door. Eddie opened it to find his mother in a red kimono and a Susie homemaker apron on. She was holding two plates filled with re-heated barbeque chicken and instant mashed potatoes.
Eddie groaned when he saw the food. “No ma, I told you we already ate.”
The look that crossed her face was one that said she vaguely remembered him telling her that but was too far gone to admit it. Instead, we watched through the open bedroom door as she threw both plates into the sink with a clatter. She picked up the wasted food and chucked it out the back door, screaming “no one deserves anything!” at the top of her lungs. She was so demonstrative that her kimono came undone and one pale, misshapen tit popped out. Eddie rushed over to cover his mother up. He tried to push her back into her bedroom, but she fought him every step of the way.
I looked over at Bill, sitting on the couch. He was still watching “Days of Our Lives” and pretending like this wasn’t his life. I thought about his ghost of Christmas future. If this was the most that I could ask for, then it seemed pretty pointless to plan my future. Somewhere along the line, Bill became disenchanted with the whole wasp fantasy, seeing it for the nightmare it really was. It warped his worldview until finally, he gave in to the nothingness and married a monster.
I didn’t know if it was because of his parents, but after that day Eddie started exhibiting some frankly bizarre behavior. He would stay up for days at a time, always taking things a step too far. When we smoked, he would smoke at least an ounce a night. I had always thought that at some point your high plateaus, but there Eddie would be packing yet another bowl when all I wanted to do was watch T.V.
When we drank – which just reminded him of his parents - he would finish the bottle as fast as he could and vomit it up all over my bathroom. He would clean up with whatever was on hand, one time covering the floor with Armor-All and almost killing my mother when she went to use the toilet at three in the morning.
Once he asked me to pick up some cold medicine for him at CVS, saying only “they don’t let me buy this here anymore.” And he always seemed to have rubbing alcohol on him. I found out much later that he used it to make hash, a method he came across on the internet.
How did the sweet, naïve kid who worshipped the ground I walked on, get to this place? Still, I didn’t feel like it was my place to say anything. I wasn’t exactly sober myself. I think he thought that by not doing the harder drugs, he was avoiding the addictions his parents had. But if that was the case, then he really wasn’t doing a good job showing he was a-okay.
Mom came down to the basement one morning to find him sitting in the dark, staring at the dryer, waiting for his laundry to be done. His behavior was seriously starting to get on her nerves. But what could we do – tell him to go home? That seemed excessive.
Taking Eddie aside, Mom told him that she felt like she had to make up for the fact that she didn’t do more to help his father back in the day. This struck a chord with Eddie and they ended up sobbing together. He came out of that talk telling me how lucky I was to have a mother like that.
**
Home from boarding school with a whole summer ahead of me, I was looking to get into some trouble. I had taken mushrooms once before with Dean and I remembered how my house looked on them. The walls bulged as if the floor and ceiling were pushing in on it and the lamp atop our television gave off a ghostly halo. Those were the last things I noticed before passing out and sleeping through the worst of it. But now that I was older, I wanted to try again. Eddie had never taken shrooms before and jumped at the chance to try something new. We decided to go halfsies on three-eighths, so if we liked the first eighth we could add on to the high.
By the time Rich got to us though, it was late. He showed up strung out, with a bunch of new piercings. We tried to get him out the door in an orderly fashion, but he insisted on smoking weed with us before leaving. “You remember when you freaked out at my house?!” he asked me, excitedly.
I pretended like I didn’t know what he was talking about. After we finished smoking, I was exhausted. It didn’t make sense to take the shrooms that night. Eddie and I agreed that we would wake up early the next morning and do this thing right. I climbed the stairs to my attic bedroom and fell fast asleep. I was fully unaware that Eddie had already planned to stay up all night doing mushrooms.
Not just his, either. Mine too.
All of them.
I awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the sound of my mother yelling up the attic stairs, telling me that Eddie needed me. I was half-asleep, so I just rolled over and went back to bed. I got the full story much later.
Eddie had enjoyed the high for about ten minutes. He laughed watching our family labradoodle, Charlie, run across the couch. But it wasn’t the whole dog, “just his top half.” When that adventure ended, the rest of the mushrooms caught up with him. Eddie felt a great fear seize him, convinced that the ceiling was going to collapse. He wanted to get help, but when he looked at the staircase going to the second floor, it looked miles away. When he finally got there, he didn’t trust his balance and crawled up the stairs on all fours.
Unfortunately, the first bedroom he came to was my mother’s. She was sleeping soundly as he leaned over her and pried her right eyelid open with his fingertips. When she woke, startled, he asked “why you?!” Then he screamed in her face at the top of his lungs and ran out of the house. That was when Janet yelled for my help. And when I promptly went back to sleep.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Once she got dressed, Mom went downstairs to find the back door wide open and swinging in the breeze. She made sure the dog was still in the house, then drove around the neighborhood looking for Eddie. She found him two blocks over, sitting in a stranger’s open car, beating the horn. It was 6:45 in the morning.
Janet quickly got him out of that car and into her Volvo. In the short ride back to our house he relayed the odyssey he’d been on the last couple hours. Mom listened, horrified. When Eddie said he had to go home, she was secretly relieved. She said she’d drive him. She just needed a coat. In the short time she was indoors, Eddie fled from her car and ran to his own. He drove away as Mom exited the house.
Somehow, he made it home in one piece, but ended up crashing into one of the pillars of his driveway. It woke his mother. She listened to his problems, then called Janet up, furious. To her, this was all my fault. I was older. I should have known better. Mom stood up for me, but the fall out was swift: Beth ended up sending Eddie away to a mental hospital for juveniles. There they loaded him up with enough Thorazine to handicap a bull.
As unfair as all of this was, I realized that it might have been for the best. Eddie hadn’t been right for a long time. Maybe he wanted something like this to happen. Something to make it all stop. I could certainly sympathize. I found myself pulling away from people.
With an entire summer in front of me, I banished myself to my dusty attic tower. I would sit in my third-floor window frame, my leg dangling out the window, staring out at the neighborhood like the gargoyle I was.
The only person that would visit me was my sister. Whenever Jesse would knock at my door, I’d angrily throw it open and tell her to leave me alone.
“Why are you so mean?!” she’d ask. “I just want to hang out with my brother!” After she went away, I felt like shit.
But every movie I watched just seemed to depress me. Maybe it’s because movies lie. They teach you to believe in happy endings. They make you think your dreams are possible. They tell you you’ll get the girl. Now all I saw was the clothes I would never own, the cars I would never drive.
Giving up on “films,” I would scour the TV guide for erotic thrillers and HBO specials.
The T.V./VCR hybrid that I had, possessed a very workable recording setting. Anything that promised nudity was recorded. Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” (that speaker scene?! That bathtub scene?! That lesbian camp scene?!), “Pinocchio’s Revenge” (they had a housekeeper who liked to take showers), and basically any “Real Sex” episode. Though I must say, I was most partial to the one with the adorable blonde who got her rocker boyfriend a sex doll and together they had a threesome with it.
In my rookie years of beating off I could manage three to five times a day. Three was doable, but five took up large chunks of the day and it became harder and harder to cover my tracks. Only once did I hit six times in one day. This coincided with a hangnail I got, and when my hand slipped, I received a nasty gash on my foreskin. It was bad; I had been doing it so much lately that the skin was already chafed. But what was worse was laying off for a week while it healed. I think I made it to four or five days before I finally gave in.
I tried to avoid going downstairs at all costs. Pete had won his suit to get out of child support and Mom spent her time drinking and looking at her bills. So, I stayed in my room. If I needed to piss, I used a Gatorade bottle. When it was full, I’d dump it out the window down into the driveway. It got to the point that Mom would yell at me if she saw an empty bottle going up to the attic. I spilled one once when moving a quilt and the antique floorboards immediately sucked it up.
The smells started to add up. I stopped bathing. I ate only a bite or two of every meal and left the plates to rot all over my room. Despite the diet, I started to gain an obscene amount of weight, something I attributed to my meds. I slept during the days and stayed up all night. When I was awake, I couldn’t relax. I tried to write, but I was so far from creating something I could be proud of. When I wasn’t working, I would pace for hours, believing someone out there had it in for me. I felt Dean’s betrayal as keenly as if it had happened yesterday. He and his friends were probably out there laughing at me, planning some kind of retribution.
I knew I was devolving into a craven fiend, but I didn’t care. I was in the right place for it. The house was falling apart. Ivy was coming in through the attic window, which only helped the small animals scale the house. I would wake in the middle of the night to scratching and use my cell phone screen to see that a fifty-pound raccoon was perched in the windowsill, clawing at the glass trying to get in.
Near my head when I slept, the squirrels that had taken over the bird’s nest in the roof would spend hours running back and forth throughout the walls, making sleep near impossible. The elements were threatening to come into our house and there was no stopping them. Like Uncle Bill, I didn’t want to be locked outside. Because how long could you survive on your own? In the wild?
When Eddie was sent away, no one tried to stop it. Was the rest of my family going to abandon me like they did Eddie? I prayed for a breakdown like his, knowing it’d be a vacation from my problems. For the first time since I tried to kill myself, I was seriously thinking of ending it all--
“Taylor we’re gonna be late!” my mother called up the attic stairs.
“For what?” I hollered back.
“Vanowen’s. We’re going for dinner.”
I looked about my fetid room. “Kinda got my own thing going on up here...”
But Mom wasn’t in the mood. “Be in the car in five minutes!”
Begrudgingly, I put on yesterday’s clothes and left my room for the first time in weeks.
I was silent on the ride over. I dreaded seeing anybody. When we arrived, I remained sitting in the car until Mom had to yell for me to come in. I dragged my feet the entire way.
We had barely sat down at the kitchen table before the subject of Eddie was brought up. The Vanowens hadn’t seen me since Eddie’s breakdown and immediately jumped on the blaming me bandwagon.
“You’re older, you should have known!” Lynn insisted.
But they had picked the wrong day to mess with me. “Is this what you do when Janet’s not available to push around? You move onto the next guy?”
“No, we tease Janet because Janet can take a joke.”
“And I can’t? You’re right - I never laugh. See, this is what you do! You push me. You push me until I can’t take it anymore and I explode. Is that what you want? To see me scream so you can say to yourself, ‘my kids would never make a scene at dinner?!’”
“Taylor, calm down! You’re acting feral!” Lynn implored me.
I was unaware that I was screaming. “Oh, and you’re the barometer of normal?! Just look at your family! If you were really honest, you’d admit that you’re actually just a little bit afraid of your children.”
“Maybe you’re afraid of my children,” Lynn blurted out before she could stop herself.
Kev turned to his wife trying to regain the peace, “Stop Lynn, we took it too far, we see that now, Taylor--”
“It’s not my fault you gave birth to fucking monsters!” I screamed.
“Hey!” Kevin blurted out. “That’s not right!”
“Fuck you!” I yelled at him.
“Taylor!” Lynn shrieked, offended to her core.
“Fuck you, too!”
I watched as Lynn’s eyes bugged out. She glared at my mother, as if demanding she do something about me.
Still, I continued my tirade. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to look down at her! You’re raising a family of psychopaths and you don’t care as long as they smile politely and shake your friend’s hands at parties. They treat you like a maid! Because you let them! You are a doormat who takes her frustrations out on my family! She’s doing this on her own – you shit!”
“That’s enough!” My mother finally said, cutting in. And from the way I heard her say it, I knew that dinner was over. Which was fine by me, because as far as I was concerned...
I was done with this family.