My mother didn’t die in a car accident. That day, she’d walked down into the basement and shot herself. Throughout my childhood, which she’d made exceptionally happy, I don’t remember seeing my mother sad. There was no indication she would do what she did. My mother was beautiful, and whenever people spoke of her they always said how lovely she was. She was a homemaker who sewed her children’s clothes from scratch. When I was small, I had very bad feet and a difficult time walking, and she would lift me up and carry me around. It took tremendous patience, physical and emotional strength for my mother to get me through that time. She had a lot of love, and when she left us, it felt completely out of the blue. It didn’t sink in that she was gone until the next day, when I answered the phone to hear a man say he was sorry for my loss and would I authorize the donation of my mother’s eyes, so someone else could see? I didn’t understand what he was asking and I hung up on him mid-sentence. But that was the point that I realized my mother was really gone. I was eight years old.
I didn’t go to her funeral. My dad didn’t think I could handle it. I was too young, and it had been difficult enough to lose a few pets. I was the type of kid who found a dead bird on the road and made a point to give it a proper burial. My dad did allow me to read the note my mother had left in her delicate blue handwriting,
on a plain, white, crumpled piece of paper. It was a short note. I think it said something like, “I’m in a better place.” She wanted us to go to church. I don’t know what happened to the note, but I can still remember holding it and reading it over and over again, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Because it was the last thing she’d asked ofus, my siblings and I went to Sunday school. I’d been to church before and had learned some things about religion in school. But I didn’t know much, and what little I’d been taught hadn’t made much sense. Class was held in the basement of Rosemont Church where we recited the scriptures, learned the order of the gospels, and sang songs. Every week our teacher brought us little gifts, things like bookmarks, prayer cards, or stickers. We sat solemnly at long tables and were expected to be serious and studious. Above all, we had to stay silent, something at which I have never been very good.
One day, a quiet, timid boy approached me and summoned the nerve to ask, “Did your mom really shoot herself in the head?” I just looked at him. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think anything except that he already seemed sorry for what he had said, very aware he couldn’t take any of it back. When I didn’t answer, he looked down in embarrassment. Behind him, I noticed three older boys, laughing nervously, trying to shake off the awkwardness that had ruined their joke. I could tell they’d put him up to it. That day in class I would learn that suicide was the worst sin a person could ever commit. It was considered murder, and if you did it, you would go to Hell for all of eternity. That day was my last day at Sunday school.
The idea of my mother burning in Hell gave me nightmares. In the middle of the night, I’d wake up to see a witch watching
me from my bedroom door. She wore a black gown that seemed much too large; it completely covered her feet and her hands. She was ugly, hideous, older than any person I had ever met, transparent with a colorful, static quality, like the texture you’d see on a television when it wasn’t set to a station. There was a consciousness about her, an energy that mocked me, terrified me. She gave off her own light in a room that was completely dark, but sometimes I could feel her before I saw her. She didn’t have a voice, but somehow she’d send me thoughts. She’d project ideas like, “You’re such a bad kid,” and, “You make me sick.” Or she’d repeat the things I’d say in my head. I would see her and think, “Oh shit” and she’d send each word back. I could tell she hated me, and, seeing the look of disgust on her face, I’d literally piss myself with fear. She never blinked, never opened her mouth, never appeared or disappeared; she was just there, unless she wasn’t. She hung around for months like this, until one night, I summoned the courage to move toward her, slowly, with one arm extended and the other shielding my eyes. Eventually I made it through her, all the way to the door, and when I turned around, she was gone. She never came back.
I learned that my mom had previously been hospitalized with depression, that she’d had a nervous breakdown once while I was visiting my grandmother. I was told that she just couldn’t stop being sad. After she died, the drinking in our house increased tenfold, and during these somber occasions I’d learn small bits about the things my mother had kept secret. It was said that Uncle Roy had signed my mother out of the hospital against her doctor’s advice. I listened in on whispered rumors that Uncle Roy had raped my mother and another one of his sisters. I heard
he’d given her drugs. After her funeral, I went through her purse and discovered a bunch of pale green, pink, and white capsules. I threw them into the toilet, crying as they dissolved, because it scared me to think someone else could have taken them and wound up killing themselves too. It wasn’t hard to piece things together. I believed it when people gossiped that Uncle Roy had blood on his shoes the day my mom died. I could imagine him encouraging her to pull the trigger.
My father couldn’t cope with the loss of a wife and sudden single parenthood. His life had been difficult. He lost a sister he adored to leukemia when she was just fourteen. His father, a machine gunner in the Polish army during World War II, had been captured by the Germans and retrained to fight the Russians. The Germans told him if he ever surrendered, the Russians would torture him so badly he’d wish he were dead. When he was in Siberia, his machine gun froze, and he began desperately dousing it in whiskey, trying to loosen it up. The Russians outnumbered him, and they began screaming at him to surrender; he yelled back that he wouldn’t succumb to torture. Finally, a Russian soldier attacked him and stuck a bayonet into his skull. He had been shot four times. His life was saved in a Russian hospital, and at the end of the war he was released. But he was left with terrible, chronic pain as a result of his injuries, and he hanged himself in the neighbors’ barn when he returned home. My grandmother died less than a year later of cancer. My father had to quit school in eighth grade to help support his family.
My dad started drinking a lot and became, more or less, a functioning alcoholic. He’d done construction work most of his life and he worked hard to take care of us during the week. But
every weekend was a party and he would get wasted in such a way that I knew he still hurt over my mother. We had several live-in baby sitters and, occasionally, relatives would help take care of us. All three of my closest childhood friends had fathers who were alcoholics, and we helped each other when things got out of control at one of our homes. I would stay at a friend’s place if my dad was too drunk, and they would stay with me if things got a little too dysfunctional with their families.
Throughout the rest of my childhood, Uncle Roy showed up once in awhile. He’d stumble around our house, collecting various discarded bottles of alcohol, so that he could drain the very last drop from each into a terrible looking concoction he’d chug in two or three huge, sloppy gulps. He’d be extremely sick from withdrawal as he tried to gather enough alcohol to stay drunk for just a few more minutes. One morning, I watched him perform this desperate ritual as I got ready for school. He shook and staggered around, clinking with the bottles he clutched to his chest. “Hey,” he muttered almost inaudibly, though he was clearly intent on getting my attention. His eyes were bulged and bloodshot, barely focused. “Promise me something,” he strained to say, slouching over and slobbering out the sides of his mouth, “Don’t ever drink, okay?” I remember thinking to myself that I wished he would just die already. “I won’t drink,” I said, and, with that, he finished off the last of his homemade sludge and I ran off to school.
I own only one photograph taken of me before my mother died. In it, I seem healthy, alive, and vibrant. When I lost her, I became withdrawn. I hadn’t heard of suicide before. It didn’t make any sense, and what I couldn’t understand left me scared. I was
terrified my siblings and I would be put into foster care. Relatives would whisper things over my head. They’d question my father’s ability to care for us and offer to take us in. No one ever talked directly to me about the nature of my mother’s death. I was never able to grieve properly because I wasn’t given the opportunity to make sense out of it. It hurt to see my father suffer, to see my four-year-old little sister left without her mom. It took me a long time to realize what an effect her death had on me. She was the most important person in my world.
When I was ten years old, I discovered a beat up copy of
Helter Skelter,
the bestselling book about Charles Manson and the infamous 1969 Manson Family murders. Its pages found me from a dirty corner in an abandoned house in which I was playing, a rotting, wooden structure, filled with dirt and leaves that had blown in through broken windows lined with shards of glass. The book was cracked and blistered with age, withered and yellowed from sun exposure, and broken in many places along its spine. It smelled rank with mold and mildew.
The first time I opened that book, I knew it was evil. It scared the hell out ofme, but I couldn’t stay away from it. Every time I tried to read it, I’d have to stop because I’d become sick with anxiety. I knew that I was peering into a very dark unknown and it terrified me to think of what I might find inside. I’d heard on television that Charles Manson was one of the wickedest men alive. His story had scared me, even though, then, Charles Manson seemed confined to the television set. But looking through the pages of the book, staring at his image, I felt compelled to confront him.
At Sunday school, I’d learned about the coming of a false prophet, who would fool everyone by pretending he was Jesus, then ultimately deny salvation. Suddenly, everything started to make sense. Charles Manson was the Antichrist. I was sure ofthat. I knew from Sunday school that once a person was possessed the only way to save him was to catch him sleeping and pound a stake through his heart. You could see it in his eyes. But you couldn’t do that to Charles Manson. I knew he was in prison. He had even been on death row, but somehow they couldn’t kill him. Because he could hypnotize people to do whatever he wanted. Just by opening the book, I believed he knew me, and could thus read my mind and brainwash me too. He would try to make me do horrible things. Manson made people shave their heads and commit murder. He had to be evil, because he always made his followers write on the walls in the blood of the people they killed. That was the sign. Charles Manson was my boogeyman.
The most horrifying thing inside
Helter Skelter
was a photo of Charles Manson with a swastika carved into his forehead. It fascinated me to think of how that mark came to be, sliced inside the space between his eyes. I pictured him staring into a mirror, carving the twisted symbol into his own flesh with some makeshift knife he’d shaped by tediously filing the end of a plastic toothbrush to a point. In my imagination, he’d stand there, grinning like the ultimate madman, as drops of blood dribbled down his face and fell with silent plops onto the cold, concrete floor of his prison cell.
I knew about asylums and mental hospitals Surely Charles Manson must have lived in such places. I pictured him pacing on all fours behind bars, like an animal in a cage, surrounded
by keepers who would poke him from the outside with sharp sticks, teasing him, tormenting him for their own amusement. I could see him wrapped in a straightjacket in a padded cell, like a doomed insect cocooned in the web of a hungry spider.
He was the Godfather of Madness in all of his glory. Something told me he was the only human being alive with the power to make sense of the pain and darkness in my own life. Somehow he held the key. I never imagined he’d someday share it with me.
Fear Me!
My background is bastard, maybe, I don’t know, lies, fear, confusion, prison, juvenile hall, boy’s schools, Catholic reform schools, Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, all the different throw away places where nobody’s liked or wanted. It’s just one bigfight going on between everybody doing everything that they can get away with. It’s pretty much freedom to its full extent, like total anarchy. What do they call it, iconoclast, something like that? It’s kind of like everybody goes for what they know and you learn what you can the best way that you can and try to figure it all out before someone gets to you because, like, you already got nine scars on your left eye and five on your right and one of your ears tore half off and you got a bunch of scars and broken bones. You’ve been fighting ever since you can remember how to bite and scratch. You’ve finally whipped everybody in the world and they don’t want to submit to you. You tell them do what you’re told, and they say no. You say, why not, I did what I was told. You’ve got to put fear in somebody doing something and then you stand back and look at the fear that you put there and say if you don’t do what I tell you to do I’m going to invoke all that.
When I Was Young…
When I was four years old I went to visit my mother in prison. Her brother, my uncle, took me, and I was standing on the tier in front of my mother’s cell and she was doing the laundry in the toilet. That’s how they do it in prison and I seen she had two big mops in this big cell block, and it was over sixty years ago. And I’m still in the cell block here mopping the floor. Now my body goes up from the bottom up. That’s where all the rock chain gang music started. The bottom, everything starts at the bottom and grows up This is why I have so much trouble right now because there are a lot of people that understand that The plant can’t survive if you cut the root so what they’ve done is they’ve cut the root, they’ve cut my root, that way I can’t grow as well. You know, in other words they’ve found out that the way to keep me down is to cut me off from going up, but they don’t realize that when they do that they’re cutting themselves off. But they really don’t care because it’s a vindictive, like a hate thing, people have going. They accuse you of having the hate and causing the war but actually it’s them, it’s not you. It’s them that’s keeping you from doing it that starts the war, keeps the war going. And it was what they are doing to you what they’re actually doing to themselves. They’ll cut you back across confusion and tell lies and throw your mail in the trash and spray poison in your stuff and cause you trouble and move things around and they think they’re doing it to you, but actually, you can’t really do anything that don’t come back to you.