FIVE

Seeing Sugar Child in that condition kills me. Her wig is gone. I get back to the hotel, too disoriented to do anything. Later that night a fire starts in the foothills above Devil Canyon—deer and coyote flee down the canyon floor to the North End. At bedtime, I say a Christmas prayer: “Jesus in the manger, in the tiny hamlet of Bethlehem, we’re getting our asses reamed out here. Have mercy on us.”

I drop into a shallow doze at three o’clock, diving headlong into my very own pond of nightmares—daily life’s reconstructed episodes, restitched to fit inside my psyche, like wild animals are stuffed into cages at the zoo. Shazam: my mother is posing in a blue oxford shirt, a plastic bag over her head. Propping a hand on her flabby hip, she sings to me: “You’re a big little man. A big little man. You want to be Superman, don’t you?”

I dream that my mom makes a speech against the Vietnam War in her high school civics class. It’s a stifling hot October 1968 afternoon. The next day she’s summoned to a meeting by her vocational counselor, a pasty-faced white man with connections to Campus Crusade for Christ. He wastes no time being polite. “You’re against the war. And your family’s on welfare, right? You keep up your antiwar sentiments, I’ll make sure you never get off welfare or go to college. Now get out of here.”

The only doctor in town who accepts welfare patients has an office on Base Line near Tippecanoe. It’s in a shabby blue stucco bungalow, minus a waiting room—his patients wait in the dirt-packed front yard, oftentimes all day with smarter folks bringing picnic baskets and umbrellas. Disturbed by the clash with her counselor, my mother visits the doctor. He diagnoses her as hysterical and prescribes phenobarbital, what they give condemned men on death row in prison. Three weeks later, she’s committed to Patton State.

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I wake up crying, my heart beating faster than a metronome, having slept less than five minutes—if only I could sleep a little more—but it’s the greatest moment of clarity I’ve ever known. I have never felt safe in my life. Not from the second I was born. Not until the day I die. Maybe I’ll be safe in the afterlife. I have the strangest feeling I won’t.