My dad wasn’t in my life. He lived in Boston, part of a big, scrappy Irish clan that didn’t have much in the world
Dad was a street guy, a real hothead—but as he explained it, if you weren’t a hothead in Southie, you might not live to drink your first beer. One time, when he was fourteen, he was walking on his block with his twelve-year-old brother when an older guy started hassling them. My father didn’t miss a beat, just turned and walked straight up to the guy and punched him in the face. It was on.
Fifteen seconds later, the older guy was pummeling my father something serious. My father turned his head and called to his brother, “Hey, go home and get a knife out of the kitchen drawer, will ya?”
His brother didn’t understand. “Whatcha want a knife for?”
My father whacked the guy in the ribs and then turned back to his brother.
“Because if I start losing,” my dad said, “I want you to give it to me.”
My uncle ran home and got the knife. By the time he got back, the fight was over and my dad had won. A not-atypical afternoon in the neighborhood.
So that was Dad, and that was Dad’s neighborhood. I loved the stories, but I would have rather had him around. My mom left him when I was two. Don’t know why they met and don’t know why they parted.
But I knew this: He had problems with drugs. And his dad had passed away at a young age, and my father and his four siblings grew up without a man in the house. Those two things, and the hot temper, were part of my legacy, I guess.
They say the Irish are repressed, but sometimes you repress things for a reason.
My maternal grandparents had money. My mom didn’t, and she also didn’t have a good way of getting enough to support us. She and my grandmother always scrapped about this. Grandma probably could have given her $50,000 to put down on a house and get started in life, but that wasn’t her way. She’d give you $10 here and $25 there, after much pleading. That infuriated my mother. She felt like she was being treated like a ten-year-old kid.
Their arguments were the background music of my childhood.
My mom also had bouts of depression. I can remember finding her in bed at noon, and her mumbling to me that she needed a rest. I knew somehow that mommies were always supposed to be up at that time, working or making lunch and not lying in darkened rooms with all the drapes pulled.
It got her down. At times, she couldn’t get her head off that bed. It was as if her body was being weighed down by a special gravity that I couldn’t feel. I could see it in her pretty face and her exhausted eyes.
After Libby Lake, there would be other efforts to strike out on her own. It seemed like my mom could handle living with her parents for only a year or so before trying to get away. We moved into a series of bad, crime-ridden neighborhoods, each one sketchier than the last.
When I was around twelve, we moved to a place three hours by bus from my school. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to leave my friends and the teachers I loved, but there was no way I could do six hours on a bus every day. I ended up not going to school that first day. Just stayed home and watched TV. Afterward, my mom drove me back and forth to the new school, but I’d lost interest in the whole thing. I went from being an A and B student to getting C’s and D’s.
There were days when my mom wouldn’t even argue when I told her I wasn’t going to school. Instead, she’d say, “Hell with it. Let’s go to the beach.” Escape to the sand. But besides making me a primo skateboarder, it didn’t do much for my education.
The next move, when I was eleven, was to a place called River Oaks. One of my friends from middle school lived there, and when Mom announced that we had to go somewhere, I said I’d follow her to River Oaks, but that was the only place. It was a pretty run-down neighborhood, but at least I knew someone there. She agreed.
Chad, though, wasn’t having it. His attitude was I’ll stay right here with Grandpa and Grandma, thank you very much. I guess he was being smart. It was one of the things that would drive a wedge between us.
I protested, too. “Why do we have to leave?” I demanded. “All my friends are here!”
“Because we gotta go. I can’t stay here anymore.”
It’s not fair, I thought. And it wasn’t.
But I knew and my mother knew that I was coming with her. I could never leave my mom. If she said, “Brendan, get your stuff, we’re moving to the dark side of the moon,” I would have bitched for a while, then grabbed my toothbrush and my favorite toy and waited on the front stoop. I would choose my mom over anything.
But Chad was done with us. I had to move to a whole new neighborhood and try to make a new set of friends and avoid getting beaten up, without my big brother to help me. Chad was drinking by then, getting into squabbles and becoming part of the SoCal punk scene. He had a lot of rage that he got out in his music. He disappeared one time and my mom told me he was in something called “anger management.” I thought, Yeah, Chad could use that.
It hurt when Chad chose my grandparents over us. I think he saw how close my mom and I were. We had that bond that he and she never had, or that they’d lost. He was sad and bitter that I was her favorite.
I’m not sure if Chad ever said those words, but I could read it in his eyes.
I think it kept him from loving me, to be honest.
River Oaks stays in my memory because that’s where I smoked weed for the first time. The kids I was hanging out with were passing a joint around one night when I should have been at home. When it came to me, I hesitated, then said, “Why the hell not?” I put the joint to my lips and took a hit. Ahhhhhhhhh. The anxiety and sadness that were more and more a part of my life began to recede far into the distance. I loved weed from the get-go.
We lasted a year in River Oaks before my mom had to swallow her pride and go back to Grandpa’s. Each time, I returned a little more streetwise, a little angrier.
Six months later, I was twelve years old, lying upstairs in my bed reading a book about a boy who survived in the Canadian wilderness with just the hatchet his mother had given him. I loved that book; I imagined I was the little boy hacking off tree branches for firewood and shivering with cold.
Voices came up the hallway, Grandma and my mom fighting. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the sound by humming. It worked for a while. I leafed through the pages of Hatchet, humming a little louder when Grandma’s screeching voice rose higher.
Then I heard my mom say two words that caused me to sit straight up on my bed.
“I’m leaving!”
I’m leaving? Not we’re leaving?
“Brendan!” I heard her call, her voice full of anger and misery.
I tossed the book on the blanket and ran downstairs. My mom was standing there, shaking, her eyes angry, her mouth tense.
“Brendan, I’m going away for a while. You’re staying here with Grandma.”
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, but nothing came out. My mom walked by me to her room and began throwing some clothes in an old bag. I stood in the doorway.
“Mom, take me with you,” I said.
Her back was to me. She zipped up the bag—zzzzzap! I flinched at the sound.
“Mom, pleeeeease don’t go.” I followed her out to the driveway. She didn’t so much as glance at Grandma, who was yelling from the kitchen, “If she wants to go, Brendan, let her. We don’t need her here.”
My mom threw her bag in the backseat of her purple Dodge Intrepid, which had dull metal shining through where the paint had worn away. She came back to me and bent down and grabbed me, and held my body to hers. She must have said something to me, but there was a buzzing in my brain and I didn’t make out the words. She stood up, jumped in the Intrepid, and threw it into reverse. Five seconds later, she was gone in a swirl of dust.
When we spoke on the phone afterward, she tried to explain: “I had to go alone, Brendan. I have to try something new. When I’m settled, I’ll come get you.”
I’d never really had my dad. I’d lost Chad. I’d lost my crazy friends from Libby Lake. And now, by far the worst of all, I’d lost my mom.
I sat on the driveway crying until my grandpa came out to get me. He was a gentle, good-hearted man. He patted my shoulder and told me to come inside. I went up to my room and cried.
She was away six months, in Oregon. I cried myself to sleep the first four or five nights and dreamed of the day I’d make enough money to buy a big house, big enough for my mom and dad and Chad and Grandpa and Grandma. Mom finally came back after being in a car accident where she broke her back again.
When you’ve been left behind as a child, that pain never leaves you. Even if you don’t know that memory is there, it is. I would learn that soon enough.