With the family standing in a semi-circle around them, my mother and stepfather sit at the head of the dining room table holding each other’s hands. My mother looks at us with a weak, teary smile as my stepfather kisses her cheek and offers encouraging words.
We’ve only arrived ten minutes ago. John, my stepfather, called us over offering the foreboding line that our mother had important news to share with her family.
Immediately you’re thinking the worst. You won’t say the word. But you know.
Our mother’s voice was a cracking whisper. She tells us to not be alarmed, but she says her doctor was concerned and so he ran some tests. She pauses. She says what a great man her doctor is. She pauses again. Our stepfather rubs her back. She weeps a little.
Then the story spills out of her mouth and into our ears:
Our mother has developed an allergy to the smell of deodorant and cologne.
Only when the front door slams shut do we realize that our oldest brother Chris has left. Next, we hear the engine of his truck roar to life, its tires spin backwards throwing the truck out onto the street, a screaming horn and then the sound of cars colliding.
“I’m going to be okay,” our mother says. My stepfather kisses the top of her head.
Our mother is melodramatic the way nitroglycerin is a bit touchy.
We, her loving family, we see this as just another lie. Although Michael, my older brother and our mother’s pet, complains “lie is a bit vulgar.” He calls her a hypochondriac. Our Aunt Nancy is far less diplomatic. “Your mother is at it again,” she says. By this she could mean begging for attention or playing the victim or being a lunatic.
Me? I said nothing.
- – -
This isn’t an anti-smoking campaign, but know that I grew up in the smog of my mother’s chain smoking. My own private Los Angeles. Smoking so heavy, we left a trail of homes from Long Island to Houston with walls stenciled in yellow silhouettes of everything we owned.
We never got a single deposit back.
While zip codes and school mascots changed, to each town we imported the throat-stripping stench of nicotine, the ubiquitous bathroom sink-burn, and rooms filled with miniature graveyards of overflowing ashtrays.
You ask anyone in my family, they’ll tell you it has always been this way.
Moments after being born, I’m in the hospital chapel receiving last rights. I’m this close to dying from a massive asthmatic attack.
My mother will say she’s not responsible. That she stopped smoking sometime during the first trimester of each of her three pregnancies. You ask my grandparents, however, and they’ll tell you that just as soon as the placenta thwapped into the stainless steel hospital pan, my mother was halfway through a cigarette.
Here’s a memory: my mother would send me out with cash and a handwritten note to buy cigarettes from the gas station. “No, they aren’t for me,” I’d tell the attendant. “I’m an eleven-year-old, severe asthmatic.” Through the bulletproof glass, the attendant would peer down at this chubby kid standing on his tippy toes. “Call my mother,” I’d say. “Please.” They never did. Instead, he’d pass a shiny green pack of More menthol cigarettes to me while shaking his head in disbelief.
All growing up, I was the sickly kid in those ABC Afterschool Specials. Because of my asthma, I started school a year late. I never played sports. I spent most summers indoors. And I was at the doctor’s so much during eighth grade that I failed.
- – -
Until I was six, we lived in Ronkonkoma, New York. My allergist’s office was in Hauppauge. This meant traveling the Long Island Expressway, aka the World’s Longest Parking Lot. Because my mother’s eyes are so bad, she can’t drive. Long before I was born, just after she’d dropped out of high school, my mother worked for the telephone company. One day they sent her on a service call in the company van. She made it two blocks before wrapping that van around a telephone pole. Afterward, it was all office work. Before long, even that became too difficult.
A virtually-blind mother meant plenty of cab rides. Being New York, this is unremarkable. Except that it’s the mid-seventies and my mother shared her name with the immensely popular folksinger, Carole King. Apparently, droves of thirty-something women were prank calling the cab companies claiming to be a famous folk singer. It’s apparently impossible that two people could have the same name. In order to get a cab dispatched to our house, my mother began using her middle name.
My Aunt and Grandmother, to this day they still call her Carol.
At the allergist’s office, there are tests and exams. There’s a lot of sitting shirtless on paper-covered tables. There’s a lot of big people talking to me in little voices. What passed for fun was blowing into the blue plastic bong to make the ping-pong ball levitate. This tested how long I could maintain a flow of air, and how in-control I was of my own breathing.
That was the best of it.
The worst of was when my back acted as surrogate Petri dish to seventy-two different allergen-laden needles. This was to test my skin’s reaction to various allergens; there were also nasal and bronchial tests for the same thing. None of which was remotely pleasant.
The outcome of all those tests showed a bronchial allergy to nearly everything: dust, mixed tree pollens, grasses, ragweed, molds, inhalants, gum karaya, pyrethrum, oak, beech, rhizopus, hormodendrum, and the dander of nearly every single living creature known to man.
If I’d been Noah, the Earth would be populated with plastic plants and stuffed animals.
The back and forth trips between Ronkonkoma and Hauppauge went on for years. And by five, I’m being poked, prodded, examined and tested so frequently that it’s difficult to notice anymore. When my parents split up, we moved to Patchogue. Early on, my mother made me a deal: if I didn’t cry, she’d take me to a certain clown-fronted, hamburger-selling establishment. This great deal was tainted by the fact that I was also allergic to beef and milk. I grew up eating fish sandwiches and drinking condensed milk.
There we are, in the cab and on our way to the fish sandwich place, and we’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. In the lane beside us is an eighteen-wheeler, my mother had recently started dating a truck driver and so I was fascinated with these behemoths. It was a flat bed type; the kind that carries construction equipment. Not the kind that carry cows. Cows, which make milk or become hamburgers. Two things I’ll never get to taste.
I’m daydreaming about cheeseburgers when – KA-BAM
For anyone who hadn’t witnessed it, the story was all overt he news that night. A motorcycle had driven at full-speed directly into that tractor trailer’s bed. The impact severed the rider in two.
I’d seen the whole thing. Close enough to hear the guy’s last breath.
- – -
Not long after, we moved from Long Island to Ashville, North Carolina. Everything about the transition was brutal. Luckily, it was also short-lived.
Within eighteen months, we moved to Katy, Texas. This too was short-lived. In fact, besides having set myself on fire, all I remember of Texas was oppressive heat and a lot of crickets. Just a year later, our mother left our stepfather and we sneaked away to Maryland.
By the time I was ten, I’d lived in six different homes in four different states. By the time I graduated, those numbers were nine homes, in four states. Shit, that’s nearly once every two years. We were twentieth-century hunter gathers, depleting places of their cigarettes and stepfathers and then moving on.
- – -
The doctor classified my asthma as Spring, Summer, and Fall asthma. Apparently, that doctor believed Winter was to be my salvation. This was not the case. As the youngest and sickliest of three boys raised by a single mother, I was either forgotten entirely or road kill for a pack of wild dogs. Then you add in the two stepbrothers who showed up on our doorstep one day and I’m pretty much fucked.
One winter morning, after a snowstorm cancels school and our mother has gone to work, my brothers drag me from bed. Not upwards by my hands, but outward by my ankles. And I’m dragged through the house out into the living room where I spend hours tied naked to a chair while my brothers thread all the needles in our mother’s sewing basket. There’s a huge pile of threaded needles. Must be a hundred of them. The basket was a gift from our grandmother. Not so much a gift, really, as a hint that our mother wasn’t feminine enough.
What my brothers are doing is making darts for their homemade blowguns. And when they’re done, I spend several hours as their target. When they get bored I’m left naked and tied to a chair in the living room until I promise to not tell our mother.
I tell her and she says, get this, she’s too exhausted to deal with this. Not tonight, she says. Could we talk about it tomorrow. That night, while my mother falls asleep smoking and once again sets off the alarm, my brothers pummel me.
Remember that scene in Full Metal Jacket – the Soap Party scene? Yeah, just like that.
The next day there’s still several feet of snow on the ground. No school. After our mother leaves, I’m stripped naked again. This time they throw me into the snow and shoot me with BB Guns. The guns and the needles, they hurt.
Pain I can live with, but what’s the deal with stripping me naked all the time?
- – -
Just a sneak peek. More to come . . .
*Thanks to Michelle @ finefuriouslife ; )
