A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER V
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
I hassled with the airlines for two days, and finally arrived in L.A. My nineteen-year-old brother, Jerry, was waiting for me. When we got out of the parking lot I told him about Suzy. “A girl is coming out to live with me. She would have flown with me today if she hadn’t had something to clear up first. She will probably fly out in a week.”
“Well, what about our living situation?” Jerry grumbled, playing with his black hair, grown long since he got away from Dad and into the apartment five months ago. “I guess I’m supposed to drive here and pick her up?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t expecting this kind of attitude from Jerry. I thought he would share in my joy. He knew how long I had waited to have a girlfriend and how badly I had wanted one.
“Where will she sleep … with you?” Jerry asked.
“It isn’t that kind of thing … yet. She can sleep on the hide-away.”
“You have everything planned out, haven’t you? Does she have any money to help with the rent and buy food?”
“No.”
“Nice. So, we support her. Nice!”
This pissed me off. We had been supporting Jerry’s girl, Lynn, for months. In fact, that was why he took the job of taking care of me … so Dad wouldn’t blow a fuse finding the two lovers sleeping together in his castle. Lynn was supposed to be living in the university dorm, but spent most nights at our place, eating our food, which Jerry cooked. Somehow, I got switched from my double bed in the bedroom to the single bed in the front room to give the lovers privacy and room. And I spent a great deal of time just sitting, waiting … my hat fallen off … having to piss … waiting for Jerry to come back … he’d say he’d just be an hour, visiting Lynn at the dorm or driving her somewhere and it would be four hours. I let go of all that. It didn’t really piss me off at all. Jerry, if immature and a little unreliable, was a good kid and brother. He had his life to live, and I wasn’t about to hold him back. But why couldn’t I expect the same thing from him? I had my own life to live, too. That was what pissed me off … hurt me.
I came home with something to share, something new in my life and Jerry didn’t see how important it was to me. Well, if Suzy came out, he would have to accept her because he needed me as much as I needed him. He needed the $250 welfare paid him to live with me. He needed the freedom that our apartment gave him. He didn’t want to move back to Mom and Dad’s or get a “real” job, as Dad would say. So, if Suzy came, he would have to accept her. If she came … I quickly covered up that thought. She was coming.
After three hot, smoggy, overcrowded hours on the freeway, we finally got home, and I finally took the piss I’d been waiting for and drank a quart of water … the place was a mess; Mom hadn’t gone shopping for us that week. But it didn’t matter because we were just dropping by our apartment to get Jerry’s drums and soon split to Mom’s. Jerry had band practice and Dad wanted to inspect our green station wagon for dents … for excuses to threaten to pull His underaged son back under His roof and to take the car away.
It was our ritual to go over, for Dad to blow up and get ready to take the car back into his garage, for Mom to attack him arguing that without the car, Jerry couldn’t drive me to college, and we would have to move back home. I tried to stay out of it, eating the good food and sitting in the reclining chair watching the color TV. But it was hard to stay out of an absurd thing. As much as I like Mom’s cooking, I would prefer to eat the greasy Col. Sanders’ fried chicken and live in litter until Jerry learned that freedom means that Mother isn’t there picking up after him and cooking his food. By helping us, Mom was really undermining us. I saw this and kept telling them about it. but I was too weak to do anything. Mom was a magnet that was pulling me backward to her, keeping me in her force field. Jerry pretended that he was free. I knew I wasn’t free, but I wanted to be and was willing to do anything to set myself free. When Jerry told her about my unknown girl who I thought was coming to live with us, Mom said, “You have to be realistic. Do you really think she will come?”
“She said she would.”
“Like Betty said she would go out on a date with you, and then called me asking how she could get out of it without hurting your feelings. She was afraid of encouraging you because you might get too serious.”
“All I asked her to do was to go to a party with me … not sleep with me or marry me. Besides, this is different. Suzy is coming out to live with me. I don’t know what will develop from there.”
“Can she take care of you? Should Jerry start looking for another job?” Mom asked, as Jerry started fidgeting on the green sofa. “You should think of these facts of life.”
“Suzy is too weak to take care of me. I still need Jerry … he won’t lose his job,” I said. “I can’t understand this. You know how I have wanted this … for how long. You said you wanted this for me. But now when it looks like it might happen … I don’t know if it will happen … it might fall through … but it looks like it might happen. Now, you are not with me. You keep throwing all these things at me, making me feel a little bit guilty about having her come out.”
“You should have some consideration for me. It is my place too,” Jerry said.
“I do have consideration for you. I don’t do dope there. My friends don’t come around much because they make you uneasy. I understand all of that and it’s okay. But this is important. I can’t understand why we are talking about it.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Mom said. “Why can’t you settle for some handicapped girl? Why must you keep pushing into something that always gets you hurt?”
“If a handicapped girl attracts me, I’ll … not settle for her … just try to get close to her just like I try to with any girl who attracts me. But I am not going to feel guilty because no girl in a wheelchair has turned me on … not because of the wheelchair, but I haven’t found one who has the same interests … who wanted to live in the world.”
“Stop being a snob. Lower your standards. Why do you always go for the pretty girls with whom you don’t have a chance. How many times of being crushed before you stop letting yourself be hurt?” Mom asked.
“As long as it takes. I can’t stop just because I got hurt before. Maybe the next time it will be different. But if I didn’t take risks and go after what I wanted, it would pass … and I would never know. I’d rather get hurt than not know.”
After a long pause, Mom asked, “What’s the matter with her?”
“What makes you think that anything is the matter with her?” I asked.
“Because any girl that would want you must be sick.”
I simply started bawling. What else could I do? I just cried. I couldn’t stop crying.
How could she say that? How could she believe it? I would have expected Dad to say that; it wouldn’t have touched me if he was the one speaking. He never did understand me, even though he loved me. It wouldn’t have bothered me.
But I was helpless, defenseless, when Mom’s belief in me turned out to be not there at all. I told her everything … almost everything … over the dinner table each day when she was feeding me … talking about philosophy and religion … telling her about my first acid trip so she could write her term paper on drugs. She pushed me into things when I was a kid, treating me like a normal kid. Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Sunday School. Of course, she was the Den Mother, and taught a Sunday School class, and was involved in the Crippled Children whenever I went to a special school. She pushed me into schools, sometimes into regular classes. When that was impossible, she taught me herself at home. We read the same books and became disillusioned with the Christian Church for the same reasons. I got my pointer, talking board, and typewriter when I was eighteen and turned out to be a political radical, with socialist ideas, and Mom followed along as far as she could and still be married to a military man.
Dad accused her of brainwashing me. People always did that. Whenever I had an idea, got a good grade, or a merit badge, people gave her most of the credit as if she did the work for me. It was hard to tell where I ended, and Mom began. Even for me, it was hard. Every time before when I moved away from home, moved away from her, there were still strings, seemingly forced on us by welfare … things like her getting my check. The strings undermined my freedom, my own life. They pulled me back home, back under her shadow. We could have probably broken the strings. But it was too easy for me to let her help. However, when she said I was undesirable, something snapped. I was on my own … had no one.