With or Without You: A Memoir (16 page)

“He tells me over and over that he’s in love with me,” Mum said. “And I’m, like, ‘Ol, what do you want
me
for? I’m fat!’ He doesn’t care. Black men like big women. I mean, he wants to
marry
me, Nik. He said he’s never met a woman like me in his life. Oliver’s a millionaire, you know.”

The salient feature of Oliver—a man I never met but spent a lot of time praying would come into our lives—was not that he was rich but that he was sober. My mother was a natural-born junkie. She
lived with a consistent, daily appetite for heroin and prescription painkillers and, on special occasions—Christmas, birthdays, the 1980s—crack and cocaine. Oliver hadn’t touched drugs or alcohol in more than fifteen years and had no intention of doing so again, except as a salesman.

One afternoon, as Oliver and Kathi were driving around Cape Ann, he hit the dashboard of his Lincoln and thanked my mother for buying it for him.

“Ol says to me, ‘Kathi, this new house I’m buying, it’s already half yours. You paid for it. If you won’t marry me, won’t you at least live there with me?’ ”

“Marry him, Mum. Do this for yourself. Please.”

But my mother was already married when she met Oliver. While she was out burning money for her amusement, her husband was sitting faithfully in front of one of the two televisions that were always blaring at our house, cigarette in hand, a can of beer close by. He didn’t worry about his wife driving around with another man, and he didn’t need to; Kathi’s marriage vows were a promise that she actually kept.

ONE SPRING MORNING IN
1986, a few days after I’d gone to the hospital to have a ring on my finger removed, I discovered the man who had driven us to the hospital sleeping next to my mother in her water bed. The skin on his back was pitted with acne scars and the breath wafting from his open mouth stank of beer. It was a weekday morning, time for me to go to school, and I knew from experience that I had a better chance of waking up this stranger than of rousing my mother. Kathi slept like the dead. I could shake and shake her but she wouldn’t budge until I’d pressed ice cubes or a cold jug of milk against her leg. Even if I succeeded in waking her, there was no guarantee that she would then get up and drive me to school. And every time a “tardy” showed up on my report card another tiny ulcer seared the lining of my stomach.

“Hey.” I shook the sleeping man’s shoulder. His snores stopped and he looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “Hey. Can you give me a ride?”

He got up, pulled on his pants, and lit a cigarette. The car he drove was a blue Chevy Nova with one brown door. On the ride to school, Michael leaned his body toward the open window as though he might curl up and take a nap there. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other drumming out the beat of a tune from the radio on his knee. When we got to St. Mary’s, I hopped out of the car. Michael leaned out the window and called out, “Smell ya later!”

My mother dated this cabbie for about two weeks before he packed all his clothes into the back of his car and moved in with us. Four years later—on my tenth birthday—they got married.

MY MOTHER HAD CATASTROPHIC
taste in men. She tried to blame this on me. “You were such a guy magnet, Nikki. They always fell in love with you first.”

One of her suitors was a drug dealer named Richie. His claim to fame was that he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew George Jung, the man whose life story would one day become a movie called
Blow
, starring Johnny Depp. Richie had grand plans for my mother to smuggle cocaine for him in my diapers.

“He told me to meet him in Florida,” Mum recalled years later. “He even bought you and me round-trip tickets. But I was too afraid.” She made a fist with her hand and bit it anxiously. “Oh, sometimes when I think of the money we could have made, I just want to cry!”

I was too young to remember Richie. All the other boyfriends have fused into an amalgam named Raúl, a congenital scumbag who bought my mother a lot of gold necklaces, then ripped them off her neck one afternoon when they were fighting and tried to flush them down the toilet. I don’t remember how old I was then, only that I openly despised Raúl and he and my mother tolerated this just fine. The morning after one of their all-night coke binges, I found a can of soda on the bathroom counter and took a swig. Flat, syrupy cigarette
ashes went down my throat and quickly came back up. It was a point of pride for me as a kid that I could vomit all by myself, no assistance necessary. (My mother cried like a baby and made me rub her back whenever she puked.) I cleaned myself and the bathroom, then gleefully told my mother what had happened. I was fishing for a sympathetic yelp, maybe even a conciliatory Happy Meal.

“Fuckin’ Raúl,” Kathi said. But anyone could have left the can in there. It could easily have been her.

MIKE THE GREEK WAS
how Kathi introduced the cabdriver to our family. He grew up in Danvers, in an apartment just across the river from my mother. His father owned a taxi company whose office and garage were next door to his home. Michael started sweeping the garage when he was eleven years old and learned auto mechanics in high school. His father treated him worse than any of the other employees, scheduling him around the clock and paying him less. It was in this garage and in the dark, wood-paneled dispatcher’s office upstairs, papered with decades of crinkled porn and ripped-out comics, that Michael smoked his first cigarette and drank his first beer, probably alone.

“He grew up in a dungeon,” my mother said. She felt sorrier for Michael than for anyone else in the world, including herself.

FROM THE GET-GO
M
IKE
the Greek seemed different from my mother’s other boyfriends. He was clownish and mellow when he was sober, quiet but quick to laugh when he was drunk. He loved Led Zeppelin loud and Neil Young electric. He loved the crude, stuttering freaks on
The Howard Stern Show
. He always had a working car, and he sang along to the radio with passion. By the time he took up a permanent post in my mother’s water bed, I had already decided to like him.

Michael and Kathi would get high and smoke cigarettes all night in our living room. They were so happy and in love that my mother
would let me stay up as late as I wanted with them. She made me my favorite mocktail—Coca-Cola on the rocks with a dash of milk. I made up funny stories to entertain them while they took turns cutting and blowing lines off our coffee table, an old wooden lobster trap with a plate of glass on top. We rented Brian De Palma’s
Scarface
so many weekends in a row that the video-store owner let us keep it. Michael did an amazing impression of Pacino’s Tony Montana. For a spell, he had an almost autistic tendency to talk with a Cuban accent, so much so that my mother and I started calling him Mang. When I had to leave a note for him, I would address it like this:

My mother drove a taxi for Michael’s father for almost six weeks before she quit. “I swear to Christ, I’ll never work for another Greek as long as I live,” she said. By then her goal had been achieved—a live-in boyfriend who helped her pay bills and didn’t mind chauffeuring her daughter around town. She used the opportunity to go back to school and get her manicurist license.

As Michael’s father grew older and increasingly alcoholic (the elder Greek died painfully of liver cancer in his early sixties), my stepdad became the reluctant boss of the C&A Taxi Company. It was the inheritance of a migraine. The company consisted of a small fleet of broken-down cabs serving a suburban community where nearly everyone with a driver’s license owned a car. The mainstay of the taxi business was a few elderly women who could no longer make it to the supermarket and back on their own and who tipped ten cents on a five-dollar fare.

It was clear that Michael was going to run his father’s business into the ground, so Kathi started hanging around the office to see if she could help. Only two of the nine cabs were running, and the accountant,
a wizened old man who was himself dying of lung cancer, recommended Chapter 11. With no education, business, or even managerial experience whatsoever, my mother transformed C&A Taxi into Kathi, Inc., a coach and livery company specializing in the transport of special-needs children. She secured five- and six-figure contracts with every school district on the North Shore. She was on a first-name basis with several superintendents and town selectmen. At Christmas, our run-down little house would be filled with gourmet fruit baskets from various school committees and PTAs. Within a few short years, my mother’s new company was grossing a million dollars a year.

“Nikki,” she said, “your mother is literally a millionaire.”

Millionaire
became Kathi’s favorite word. She dropped it into every conversation, telling anyone who would listen how much money she made and spent in a given day. Coming from her demographic, it was hard for Kathi to understand money as the abstraction that it is. Saving, investing—these things were not within her ken. Profligate spending, however, was a talent she’d perfected long before she had the capital to fund it. While Michael sat on the living-room couch watching NASCAR races and drinking Budweiser, my mother and I went shopping. She bought me a calfskin trench coat the color of crème brûlée that cost what I now, as an adult who lives alone, pay for one month’s rent. Since the day she bought it for me more than ten years ago, I’ve worn it only twice. Both times, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without imagining a bullet ripping through the buttery leather and staining the beautiful coat with my blood. She bought my college boyfriend, now a filmmaker, his first professional-quality video camera. I had my own American Express card attached to her account, which she encouraged me to use whenever I liked. The lie I told myself was that Mum’s credit card was for emergencies only. Every time I got into a fight with her, I declared an emotional state of emergency and took my boyfriend out to dinner.

For my college graduation present she flew us to Paris. I don’t remember much about this trip besides blowing my mother’s OxyContins
and puking in front of the Eiffel Tower. For our last full day in France, I sobered up and demanded that we go to the Louvre. Kathi got good and high before we left, and for the first twenty minutes she walked around the museum with a truly inspiring sense of wonder. I remember watching her approach an early Christian painting of the Madonna and Child. She got so close that I was afraid she would reach out and touch the canvas. I held my breath and scanned the perimeter for both exits and security guards.

Kathi stepped back and laughed. “Look at his little dinky!” she cried.

I ushered her to another room filled with Greco-Roman statues. My mother shrugged. “Either there’s a head without a body or a body without a head.” She was coming down from her high, growing much harder to impress. When she sat on a bench to rest, I was relieved. For the moment, Kathi was at a safe distance from any work of art. I looked at some of the statues, forcing myself to think sophisticated thoughts about them, always glancing back at my mother to check on her. Right there on a bench in the middle of a grand hall in the Louvre, Kathi pulled a little straw out of her shirt pocket and an OxyContin that she had crushed up and saved in a folded scrap of paper. I watched her blow it up her nose while sitting in the eminent shadow of the
Winged Victory of Samothrace
.

“What?” she cried when she caught me gaping at her. “We’re in France, for Christ’s sake. Why are you always so concerned with what other people think?”

We never made it to Versailles, but my mother had obviously been inspired by her trip abroad, because when we got home from Paris she decided to build an addition on our house. This process necessitated home inspections from town bureaucrats, who not only said that we couldn’t build an addition but, after seeing the holes in the floor and the rats nesting between the walls, had our house condemned by the Department of Health. Mum said
fine
, then
fuck it
and had the whole house torn down so that she could build a new one in its place. During the next few months, a structure three times the size of the old house was built. Part of me never believed it would
be finished, or that my mother would live long enough to move in. Kathi’s Xanadu, I called it.

It was painful for Michael, a tall goofy guy always lurking at the edge of the room, to see the business he despised and was determined to destroy flourish in the hands of his bold, ambitious wife. The more she and the business succeeded, the more he drank. He started drinking in the mornings, and stealing my mother’s painkillers. She knew that he was stealing from her and was hurt only by the fact that he didn’t just ask her for them. Of course she would have said yes. My mother had to hire another mechanic to follow Michael around the garage and fix his shoddy work. Mang still dispatched sometimes, sitting in the dark, wood-paneled office surrounded by those same old comic strips, the same old pinup girls splayed across the hood of a hot rod, the paper now curled into crispy yellow flakes from thousands of cigarettes smoked by my parents and their employees. Sometimes he drove a van full of special-needs kids to and from school, though he should never have been allowed behind the wheel of a car. At night he sat alone in the living room watching TV, putting together model cars and huffing the glue.

Kathi once told me that she and Michael had no sex life. “Like none whatsoever,” she said. How does any daughter respond to that? Die a small death, then search for a silver lining—I hoped that the ritual of shooting heroin together was at least tender for them.

I CAME HOME FROM
boarding school, and later from college, to find brown scars of cigarette burns on our living-room couch spreading like a pox. One summer I lifted a towel off the armrest and discovered that a large chunk of the sofa was charred. My mother told me about the night that she smelled smoke from her bedroom, and went to the living room to find that Michael had nodded off and the arm of the couch engulfed in flames.