The Day Everything Changed

The Lil General convenience store shared a back parking lot with my grandmother’s apartment. Most days, I stopped in after school for my favorite snack – Doritos and a Mountain Dew.

I was still blasting N.W.A. through my walkman causing a bolt of anxiety shot through my body. I had to take that CD out and hide it in a more innocuous case because although my mom could have a mouth as raw as Mr. Pink she didn’t want me listening to that “filthy sh*t”.

I stepped back inside and swung my tattered Jansport book bag around so that I could find another CD case. I clicked Straight Outta Compton in behind Eagles – Their Greatest Hits – a gift from my mom. My parents, Steve and Starr, loved the Eagles. Life in the Fast Lane was their song. Admittedly, it was a fitting pick – like the couple in the song, he was brutally handsome, she was terminally pretty and they took all the right pills.

I threw the DiscMan in my bag too and exited the back door for the second time. As soon as the chimes over the door stopped clanking, I heard the commotion – several voices tumbling excitedly over each other. The bodies that they belonged to were mostly hidden by the big tree in the front yard.

Soon the first voice I had ever known cut through the cool mountain air – elevated and trembling. “Get your hands off of me, you son of a bitch! You ain’t got nothin’ on me! NOTH-ING!”

When I heard my little brother, Zack, crying I I dropped the bag of Doritos and cheese dusted triangle scattered across the parking lot. I broke into a sprint, my backpack swishing wildly behind me.

When I got to the yard, I bent over with my hands on my knees as the still-sharp thin air sucked the breath out of me. Breathlessly, I said, “Mom, mom! What’s going on? Wh-wh-why are you in the yard? People will see!”

Mom craned her neck. Her blonde hair was wet with sweat and sticking to her blotchy red face.

“Oh baby! I’m sorry. This is just so messed up. I need you to listen right now. Take your brother. Take Zack. Right now, honey! Take him inside. Gran and Angie are in there. I’m just gonna take a ride and work all this out! Everything’s gonna be alright. I’ll be back in a little bit. Ok, So-So? Can you be strong for me right now?”

I just stared at her trying to make her words make sense. Zack was clad only in a droopy diaper and a too small t-shirt that exposed his belly button. It was much too chilly for him to be out in that. He was swinging his little toddler arms at the people talking to our mom, trying to keep them at bay. His goose bumped legs clung to her so hard that they were shaking. Snot was oozing into his mouth.

She snapped her fingers in my face and handed me Zack. My body reflexively adjusted to his weight, cocking out my dominant side hip so that his almost limp body had a secure resting place. He wiped the snot that had not yet run into his mouth on my shirt. The click of the handcuffs caused Zack and me to look back one more time. My baby brother twisted and reached out, desperate to touch her. Clumsily, I readjusted so as not to drop him on the hard ground.

I hugged him tightly, probably too tightly, naively thinking that my bony teenage arms could protect him. Mom craned her head her head towards us and kept saying she loved us. She was sorry. Over and over, she said, “Sorry, so sorry, so, so, so sorry. So-So, I’m so, sorry!”

I wanted to bottle her voice up so I could hear it later. Even though she was crying, it was her good voice, the one that soothed me like a rocking chair; not the one that was so laced with dope that it sounded like it was being strangled by kudzu.

I jogged up the chipped concrete steps with Zack clinging to me like a baby monkey. I busted through the door and sat him down, ignoring his outstretched arms that pleaded with me to pick him back up.

My mom’s mom, Wanda, gran to me, walked out of her bedroom when she heard us come in. She stepped over the debris that was littering the hallway with her dancer’s grace. Despite years of competitive level tanning and smoking Lucky Strikes without the filter, this an important distinction as she contends that it is the cigarette’s filter that does all the killing, gran’s elegant, striking face had not betrayed her.

I am not sure what I expected her to say, but I know that it had nothing to do with a ham sandwich.

“Sosh, are you hungry? You look hungry, darlin’? Let me fix you a ham and cheese sandwich.”

“What? No! I don’t want a sandwich. I’m not hungry. I want to know why mom just got arrested in the front yard!”

My voice was shaky, bordering on hysterical. I spotted one of Zack’s Matchbox cars and bent over to pick it up. I thought about giving it to my little brother, thinking that the familiarity would comfort him. Instead, I slipped it into my pocket. Gran scooped Zack up and pulled a blanket from the back of her age-worn maroon sectional and wrapped him in it.

Gran exhaled, “I don’t know, my baby! I don’t know what kind of mess your mom’s gotten into, but gran is here for her babies. You’ll always have gran.” She added absent mindedly, “Everything is gonna be ok.”

I wailed, “No, everything is not going to be ok. They just arrested mom – in the yard! Where is Steve? Did he get arrested too?

Gran replied calmly, almost casually, “I think your dad is down working on the house. They haven’t gotten a phone down there yet so I don’t know if he even knows what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on, darlin’. Everything happened so fast. I’m sure it was a big misunderstanding. It’ll all get sorted out.”

I stifled a cry. “I just don’t understand. Those cops weren’t even in uniform. Why did they mess your apartment all up? Was she selling pills? Why would she be selling now that we have all that money.”

The money, around $750,000, was from a workplace lawsuit settlement. My dad’s hand was mangled in a wench during one of his rare stints of legal employment on a commercial scallop boat. Considering we had bounced from HUD-funded project apartments to trailers in various stages of dilapidation and rode around in narcoleptic cars of many colors, when we even had one, this money was a life changer for us. Within months my parents had bought a pick-up truck, a Mustang 5.0 and most important to me – a house on the south side of town, where all the preps lived. They were adding a master bedroom and bathroom in the basement. Until it was finished my whole family had been crammed into gran’s tiny apartment.

The chaos of the apartment overwhelmed me. I slumped against the entryway of the living room looking at the upturned couch pillows. I stared blankly until I heard Oprah coming from the television. I loved Oprah to the point of often picturing my life with her as my mom. But, damn did she piss me off that day. There she was; asking her questions, smiling serenely and nodding with accommodation as if the whole world hadn’t just burned to the fucking ground. At least her familiar, soothing voice broke my trance. I walked to the kitchen and snatched a black Hefty out of the box that was now on it’s side in the middle of the floor, thrown there when the cops thought that whatever they were searching for may be found under the sink.

I filled the bag with my books, clothes, blow-dryer, and a large can of Aussie mousse. Tied it up, threw it over one shoulder.

“I’m going to Conley’s,” I declared. Normally, I would have asked.

My great-grandmother, Ida Conley, whom I had given her one name moniker when I was a toddler, was less than five feet tall thanks to her sclerosis-hunched frame. She produced 13 children and she outlived three of them. Gran was third in line and the first girl. Conley was in her late eighties and spent most of her time in her king-size bed, studying the bible and watching Perry Mason reruns. Her hard-drinking, fast-swinging husband, Clyde, was long dead, gone for almost as long as he was alive. Conley was my favorite person in the world.

Gran called after me, “Honey, wait, it’s getting dark! I can drive you!”

“No, I’ll walk. I’m fine walking. I’m fine, totally fine. Seriously!”

I didn’t give her time to argue with me or for the guilt of leaving her with my brother and sister to settle in on me. I stomped out. The screen door smacked harder than I intended against the vinyl siding. I jogged out of the yard with determination but the weight of my book bag and the awkwardly bulky trash bag quickly tired me out. I stopped to catch my breath and dig out my N.W.A CD. I looked back at the area where the unmarked police car had been and clicked forward until I found F**k the Police. I threw both middle fingers in the air a là John Bender at the end of The Breakfast Club. Unlike my favorite bad boy, I frantically looked around to make sure that gran hadn’t seen me.

Then, completely surprising myself, I turned in the opposite direction of Conley’s house.

I started walking toward our new house – toward Steve. He was my biological father, but he hadn’t come into my life until I was seven – after my mom’s first two marriages. Even had anyone wanted to protest, there was no denying that he had provided half of my DNA. We had the same face – straight noses, brown eyes with flecks of gold. It was from him that I inherited the perpetual little bags that gathered under the far corners of our eyes. We had thick, shiny hair that we were both more than a little vain about.

Over the eight years between his brazen entry into my life and that day, I had watched my parents’ spiral into raging opioid addicts. As nonchalantly as my friends’ parents would pour a second glass of wine, my parents would heat up their spoons, tie off their biceps and inject liquified Dilaudid into their veins. They didn’t hold regular jobs. My parents hustled pills and waited on the first of the month.

Steve was my constant sunburn – painful on the surface but doing much more damage underneath. Under his tutelage my wild, sweet, emotional mother with her mega-watt smile and soft blanket hugs turned into a lying, conniving sunken-eyed dope fiend with a temper as fast-moving and unpredictable as a late-afternoon July thunderstorm. When their money and pills ran out, and they always did, he would pummel her face with his fist and kick her stomach with his military style boots – once causing her to miscarry. I couldn’t protect her and I couldn’t make her leave so I hated him. And, I let that hatred settle into the marrow of my bones.

However, as much as I hated him, I hated myself more. I hated myself for not being enough for her to leave. And, more recently, I hated myself for greedily accepting the gifts that his new found wealth enabled him to buy me. I knew that he was trying to buy me, but I accepted the leather jacket, boom box and Nikes just the same. If I was going to hate myself, I figured I might as well do it in name brands.

This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.

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.