We both have old eyes, eyes that have seen too much. Sad brown eyes that glint with golden flecks – when the sun hits them just right. And, our hair. God, do we have great hair.
Child, you’re the spittin’ image of your daddy. I tell you what, spittin’ image. That’s what people always said.
F**k off, you ignorant hillbillies! That’s what I always said back to them.
In my head, anyway.
My mama would have back handed me with her stubby, perpetually cracked and chapped hands had I done anything but smiled dutifully and said, Yes ma’am. I do.
People assumed that because we both looked back at them with eyes that churned like a river turned to chocolate milk after a cold winter rain that he and I were alike. We weren’t a damn thing a like, the old man and me.
Now, my mama, mama had blue eyes. Eyes that were like a field of cornflowers that twinkled with mischievous fireflies. Her hair wasn’t bad, but she had to work for it. She would roll it with hot curlers, tie it up with a handkerchief, Rosie the Riveter style, and sleep like that just so her hair would fluff up when she rain her pink Goodie brush through it the next morning.
She told me that you got used to ‘em – the curlers, that is. But, I never had that worry.
When I was little I would fret the satin edge of my fuzzy Smurf blanket and wish that my eyes were the color of my cartoon friends.
It would have been different, the whole screwed up mess of it all would have unfolded differently, had I not looked like him.
Had I not been a daily reminder of their forbidden, smoldering teenage love maybe she would have stayed married to her first husband. The one who built me a toy box and loved playing Carole King and James Taylor records, the one I thought was my dad. Maybe there would have never been the second husband, the red headed wanna-be Hell’s Angel, the one who broke mama’s wrist and threatened to feed me to his German Shepard.
Had she not thought of him every time she looked at me, maybe they would have never gone to the courthouse that cold January day and gotten married.
Had she not seen him looking back at her when she stood back from hugging me, we would have never moved to the newly-built government funded projects in Oceana WV, a strip of a town nestled deep in the Appalachians that had two claims to fame: a Rax Roast Beef and the complete lack of a certain race of people.
When I cried until snot bubbled out of my nose because I didn’t want to move away from my grandparents and my school and my friends, he said, a Marlboro Red dangling from his lips, “You’ll love it. Ain’t any nig..”
He trailed off when mama raised her eyebrow at that and he corrected himself, “Sorry. There ain’t any blacks there.”
That seemed to satisfy her.
Seven year olds don’t wield a lot of power. I had to move. I had to call him dad. I had to share a bedroom with my parents where I slept on a thin mattress on the floor covered with scratchy sheet.
I had to visit his mother who lived in the same apartment complex and had a perpetual drip of snot on the end of her nose. I had to call her maw maw. I drawled her title out, long and nasally, until my mom told me to knock that shit off.
But, what I didn’t have to do was let him form into a real person. He was an apparition. After two divorces in five years, I knew that I simply had to bide my time before he went away.
Addiction has now spread throughout the pocket of West Virginia where I spent my childhood faster than kudzu. And, like kudzu, it has strangled out the life of a courageous, scrappy, breathtaking part of the world.
People can identify addicts now. Their mouths sunken like a cake taken out of the warmth of the oven too soon and pot-marked skin that looks as if it had been attacked by a gang of ravenous mosquitos are dead give-aways when they corner people at gas stations with woeful tales of broken down cars and hungry children.
In the 80’s, before the hordes of those suffering from dope sickness descended en masse, hustlin’ was newer, easier, simpler, perhaps even a little glamorous. My dad, Steve, with his smooth good looks, wry smile and quick instincts had a million hustles.
One leftover dishwater grey morning not long after they were married I awoke to sounds that made a grin spread instantly and widely across my face – my mom’s laughter mixed with the raw longing of Janis Joplin – floating from the kitchen. I wiped the crust from my eyes and stumbled in, shaking off the shiver that always jolted through my body when my bare feet first went from the carpet to the cold linoleum.
I pushed my eyebrows together and cocked my head when I noticed that my dad’s brother, Terry, was spraying E-Z Off down his throat. Steve and Terry, were grinning and my mom, Starr, was snapping pictures with her beloved Polaroid. I blinked away the starbursts from the camera’s flash bulb and asked mom if I could shake it. She handed it to me and as the picture sprung to life in my hand.
“What are they doin’, mama?”
My dad was still coughing and cursing his brother, but there was a giddy glint to his chemical covered words “Damn, son! You didn’t have to use that whole f***in’ can? You tryin’ kill me or what?”
My mom threw her arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tight into her side. I took a big sniff of her shirt. It smelled like Tide. “Oh, your dad has a sore throat and Terry is just giving him some medicine. But, don’t you ever do that. It will kill you,” she said matter-of-factly.
This caught me by surprise and I asked, “Wait! Isn’t that stuff you clean the oven with? Can it kill him?”
Mom, detecting the glee in my voice, gave me a smirk and shook her head, “So-So, you’re always so smart. Don’t worry, They know what they’re doing. He’ll be alright.”
My uncle chimed in with, “Yeah, this crazy son-of-a-b**ch is a vampire. He’s gonna live forever!”
Steve clapped his brother on the back and whooped, “Damn skippy I am, son!”
I knew that there was something inherently screwed up with what they were doing.
However, they were all happy, silly, close to joyful, so when my mom asked if I wanted a
eggs and fried bologna for breakfast, I smiled and said, “Yes, please! Will you cut the bologna to look like Pac-Man?”
“Anything for you baby doll!”
Part II of “Dope Letters” will be published on January 15, 2018
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
I know that way too many young people carry this kind of memory with them throughout life. What a heartwrenching piece.