Chapter 31

Origins

They hardly knew one another, but they agreed to marry. There are few photos from their wedding, and I don’t remember if Mom wore white.

From the few stories Dad and Mom ever shared with us, during those moments when they’d break their resolve and actually speak about the origins of their union, you got the sense that when Dad told you a story, that he was lying, or that Mom, if she spoke about it, was ashamed.

It was evident to anyone really listening that they’d had very little in common except that each of them was as desperate as the other for some sort of escape that they both—as teenagers—imagined marriage would offer.

Dad, as a newly minted American citizen at seventeen years old and recent high school graduate, was a huge blip on the radar of the local draft board. When his two cousins had been drafted, it was brown-trousers time for Dad.

So he pounced on Mom—you get the sense that hers wasn’t the first proposal he’d offered, though he was a good-looking, stretchy bloke—and then had her producing children like a Pez dispenser.

Mom’s life had stopped there, sublimated to this role in a primitive and desperate farm-based family of natives, which was run by Gramma, who had the biggest cock in the barrio after Grampa’s death.

Mom did the only thing she could during this time and absented herself, locked herself away in the single-wide trailer in her heart, after Grampa died. (It was what she could afford.)

Grampa had been kindest to her, in the new situation, in the same way he had been kindest to me in mine, for those eight years I knew him. Maybe that’s why she resented me more than any of the other kids, in her way. Maybe it had struck some sort of primitive jealousy that Grampa, boozer and womanizer that he was—but who wasn’t, in that barrio?—had reminded Mom of the love she lost when her aunt died, and was now watching it unfold with Grampa and me; maybe that’s why she disconnected so cleanly from me for those years, and left me to the bitter mercies of Gramma and Dad.

There had been that period when she’d befriended her daughters, during their high school years, but had then become sorely disappointed at their collective betrayal when, after they’d reached college age, Mom had decided that it was her turn, and she had started college and started to leave Dad, and they turned on her, to her surprise. Her daughters had not been happy with this. Were not encouraging of their mother’s impending freedom. See, Mom picked up where she left off, at age sixteen, and began her life all over again.

She didn’t come right out and ask for a divorce—it wasn’t something anyone in our family would even consider as an option—but Mom got a very clear idea of the displeasure and disapproval she would endure for years to come from her daughters, who couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stay with her husband of twenty years. The idea of divorce had settled in the house like a layer of asbestos, and she and Derek would mostly come home at this time simply to sleep and eat, and then spend their days away from it entirely, now that it had grown dark and was the only other thing Gramma watched, besides her Univision, from across the driveway. With Dad doing long-haul driving, he was home maybe five days a month, and he liked it that way, until he heard from his mother that Velva wasn’t coming home so much anymore.

Mom flew back to Texas, and my relationship with Karis continued to get more and more textbook, more and more Freudian.

One night, with the ridiculous tension and anxiety in the air, I took a lot of LSD with Kip and Karis, but not Janine, who had to go to school the next morning. And while we sat in their apartment waiting for it to kick in, I was convinced that Kip and Karis were making freakishly animated “I love you” faces at each other when my back was turned. I started whipping my head around, trying to catch them at it, but I never did, or they were quicker than I was. Then the acid hit.

I’d always taken LSD in copious amounts in the simple hopes for a hallucination. That was it: I wasn’t asking for much. I simply wanted to experience a hallucination like the hippies used to have and describe in their music and literature. It was what we were after, in high school, when Tony and Chris and Frank and I would spend all day taking whatever we could get our hands on.

Hell, I was willing to settle for a simple understanding of Yellow Submarine, with LSD, the unusual amounts of it that I would take. I couldn’t get this stuff in Texas; the first time I ever took it was the first night I was in Seattle. I managed to put my fist through the hatchback of a Volkswagen Rabbit, but other than that, it had been a fantastic six or seven hours. I’d forgotten I’d actually taken it, come to that, because I’d been so happy to see Dan after a five-day bus ride—through fricken Idaho, of all places—and we had started in on the Henry Weinhards right away.

“Look at this,” he’d said, and showed me a sugar cube he’d plucked from the open freezer door. Unremarkable.

“It’s a sugar cube, from the freezer,” I said.

“It’s a hit of liquid LSD,” he said. “There’s a guy who lives in the apartments next door to the store where I work, and he never has any money, so he comes in sometimes asking for like milk and eggs and bread, and all he has in trade are drugs. Usually acid, but sometimes pot. I’ve been saving them.”

I looked in the freezer, and Dan had a bowl of sugar cubes in a covered plastic container, in the door. There are about fifteen of them, and some pot.

“Holy shit, man,” I say, and take it from his hand and just pop it in my mouth.

“Holy shit, man,” Dan said. “That’s quite a bit of acid you just took.” It would have been better had he quoted from Cheech and Chong: “You just took the most acid I’ve ever seen anyone take, man.”

“Wish me luck,” I said, and then drank some more beer.

Three hours later, I was in The Zoo tavern, having made it through the door with Dan’s military ID, and the dolphins in the floor tile started jumping, like animation. I looked more closely, and they kept doing it: splish, splish, splash.

Hunh, I thought, and then remembered: the acid. I forgot about the acid, man.

There was a wake in there, that night. A regular customer who’d committed suicide, and I ended up talking to a girl who was really sad. It was her ex-boyfriend, whom she really cared for, and then the back room started to glow, behind her, over the pool tables. I began to have very inappropriate thoughts, responses, to this wake. I wanted to make fun of her grief, make fun of his suicide, like it was a weakness. I was completely out of my mind, unprepared for the effects.

Anyhow, by this time, I’d done LSD more than a few times, and knew what to expect, but I wasn’t prepared to enter that state of mind with the atmosphere so electrically charged with what was going on between those two apartments. I swear, our twenties are the times of sheer lunacy: children making grown-up decisions, creating terrible beds for themselves, and others.

Karis sat at my feet, waiting for hers to kick in. Kip sat across from me, his feet touching my shins. It was like an early Bob Dylan song. We were listening to some organic college band, like Rusted Root or something. Janine was sitting on her sofa, looking over her schoolwork, when she said something, and Kip’s five-foot energy turned twelve feet tall out of the corner of my eye and he growled at her, in response, and she immediately shut down, like a beaten child, told to hold her tongue. Whoah, I thought. Did I just see that?

I looked up and over, and Janine said something again, and he did it again: He grew large at her and growled violently, and she buckled underneath it, and it all happened in milliseconds.

My perception had sped up, or time had slowed, and I started to watch people as they really interact, in microflashes and microexpressions. Kip, as a little guy, was hyperaggressive to Janine, who was taller than he was, and could be easily subdued.

When he tried to talk to me and Karis, I saw him turn into a sort of mechanical doll, repeating things he’d learned—he was trying to be funny, trying to go into schtick—but it came off horribly, like a sick pantomime, like a coin-operated grotesque caught in the same repetitive five-word phrase repeated ad infinitum, and his eyes were glowing and sharklike, dead, and Karis, who had not moved, suddenly looked first like a child, and then an absent fetus, a dirty glow peeling off of her in cakes as she smoked a cigarette. Language suddenly became impossible, and broke down into simplified multimeaning sounds that meant a hundred other things, and I concentrated more on the origins of the meaning rather than what was being said, like I was looking for the root of intention because I could see the layers of distortion as the person tried to hide some things, emphasize others, and disguise meaning. I understood far more from the body language and facial expressions of the people in the room, much more than what they were actually saying, which made no sense, when out of nowhere the stereo started playing the Grateful Dead and began to glow red, menacing, and I stood up and said, “I have to go, you can’t talk about anything in here, you’re all unhealthy,” and then ran for the door, Karis following me, and I swear that in the panic and danger of the next few seconds, of me making it down to the lower floor and into my own space, I gave off a psychic charge that could have powered a car in that walk from their apartment to ours, just downstairs.

For the next eight or so hours, my primary focus was not to lose my psychological ground. I was experiencing a collapse of logic and higher function, locked in a Hunter S. Thompson–worthy freak out of epic proportion. I was very close to complete psychosis, was very close to losing it, and probably did a few times, when I couldn’t remember my name, when I curled up like a baby and tried to write my name, so I could remember who I was, when I played an episode of The Simpsons to try to calm down, and the whole episode was written about me, when I could feel the moisture in the air, and then suddenly my body would suck it all in and become dry, cracked, like a lakebed in Arizona.

It was the ninth gate; I was going through the ninth gate, and getting the awareness of crazy panicked jazz, baby, jazz: I was seeing the notes between the notes, and it was freaking me out considerably.

But I came down from that, around eleven the next morning, in bed and looking out the window, while talking to Karis about a very uncertain future, and about all the things I saw, telling her in code that I had been aware of the affair she was about to have, or was having already.