A Pickled Past: The Brief History of a Doomed Cucumber

[Disco Pickle]

I've never told this story, and I'm not sure why I'm telling it now, to PD of all places, except that maybe because it's been a year now in September since my mother passed, and I haven't but one or two people, other than my sister, who have lived through parts of this story..  I don't want to burden them with the details..  they understand the broad strokes that have made me who I am.. I'll continue this in a day or so..  readers, or not..  I just need to get it out, once and for all.

There are some people who should have never had children.  I woke several mornings, living with my parents, thinking this exact thought.

My father would leave around 6, and turn on our bedroom lights, say "hey, get up" and that was mine and my sisters que to start our school day.  We no longer fought over who would shower first. I told her that I would let her sleep another 15 minutes later and would take the first shower shift.  

Mom would sleep.  She didn't fall asleep until around 3 or 4 anyway..   She was usually passed out on the couch.   It's not that she didn't want to go to sleep in their bedroom, more that she and the man she married just didn't get along enough to warrant sleeping in the same room anymore.

I began to realize my parents were addicted to drugs when I was about 10 or 11.  My sister, being a year and a half behind me, had no clue and I wasn't about to let her in on the dark secret.  

"Hey, you guys want to play Nintendo?"  That was the first pattern I began to notice, that gave me evidence about their behavior, their addiction.  We had one TV in the house and they usually dominated what was on..   Drama or sitcoms if mom was home..  NASCAR and WWF if my father was home..

In their frequent fights, one of them had kicked the door to their bedroom off of the hinges and they'd never bothered to replace it.  In it's place, they hung a blanket.  The smell of marijuana seeped out from around the blanket, but I didn't know what that smell really was at the time..  the sounds of them both inhaling sharply through their nose didn't make an impression on me until many years later.  At that age, while I was aware that something was going on, I was still just a child and my primary concern was fighting with my sister over whether I would get to play Legend of Zelda, or she got to play Doctor Mario..

Some people were never meant to get married.

It was around the age of 14 that I accepted that my parents really hated being around each other all of the time.  They loved each other, as only two hopelessly disfunctional and codependent, drug addicted people can..  but I could see how it wore on them both..  in my father by becoming a workaholic, immersing himself in classic car restoration..  in my mother by becoming an alcoholic, and immersing herself in her paintings and her drawings..

I was 8 when the first break in our family happened.  

My sister and I got off of the bus, came in the house and mom was sitting on the couch crying.
She said that Dad wouldn't be home tonight, and not for a long time.  Being children with no real understanding of what the reality of our parents situations or addictions were, we just cried, and hugged our mom.   We had no idea that our world was about to be flipped upside down.

One week later, our mother sits us down at the dinner table (we never actually had dinner as a family at this table..  it was just for show really) and tells us that we're going on a trip..  that we're going to Florida, to live with Nana and Pop, just for a little while, until Mom and Dad can take care of some things in Texas, and that then they'd come and get us and we'd live in Florida.

It was our first trip on an airplane.  We flew into Atlanta and were met with strangers.  They were family, and we understood that they were family, but in reality. they were strangers to us.  

After the drive back to Jacksonville we were given the ground rules of the house, and over the next two weeks we were enrolled in the local school.  We were told that our parents would not be coming to Florida for some time and that we were expected to be model children.


...  to be continued.   I've a funeral to attend tomorrow, and it's late on the east coast.

[the last yatto]

That's a lot of pressure to put on a father to be, then again I'm not addicted to anything, well except hash, which is why I been avoiding that vice for awhile now. Its a hardship I never really had to go only by proxy. By chance of aohell I became friends with one such outcast, her mom didn't really leave her with much and she's only seen her father once. Coming from a very middle class life, it was hard for me to see just how much not having solid roots for parents effected their mental health. My father played the fun one and didn't have a curfew since he didn't have one but he grew up where monthly bbq were common for everyone on the block to attend. Looking back my only problem was trying to fit in with a group of kids proud of their white trash nature.

[Eater of Clowns]

You have me as a reader.  This is an extremely intense and personal piece, one I can imagine would be difficult to get down.  You're doing it very well.

[Nurse Enabler]

Your story is sad. No kid should have to go through that. You have me as a reader too.

[Babes in Tongland]

I'm reading too...

casting aside any mistakes my parents made, I am grateful to them for never involving drugs or alcohol in their lives. I got to witness similar things with my siblings at a young age, although. I'm sorry you had to go through that. It's a strange, long, difficult process trying to put things together when you're older & realize what was really going on.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

I'm listening.

My family has its own problems and dysfunctional issues, but I have never known what it is to have a loved one addicted to drugs. Take your time, there is no need to rush. *hug*

[Disco Pickle]

my little sister decided young that her shoulders would have to bear much less of the shit that came down on our family if she went along with the flow and asked as few questions as possible.  She missed our parents deeply the year and a half we stayed with Nana and Pop, but she only let it show to me, when we were playing alone, and rarely to our grandmother, who would comfort her and tell her that our parents were ok and would be coming to Florida soon.

I took the opposite road, and bucked "the system" as often as I could.  I rebelled, refusing to be dressed as my grandparents wanted me to dress, refusing to go to their catholic church, which seemed cult like to my very loosely affiliated baptist routes.  I would ask all of the questions my sister refused to ask, or didn't have enough willpower to ask for fear of the answers.

My grandparents were understanding to a point.  When I crossed that line, as I did often that year, the punishments were swift, stern, but never more than the infraction dictated.  My grandfather handled any punishment for me, and my grandmother for my sister.  We were not bad kids, but we were kids and I understood that I frequently pushed them to punish me.  See, I resented them for our situation, parentless in a strange state, strange school, living with virtual strangers.  Even knowing, at 9 years old, that they were our saving grace, had pulled us out of a bad situation and allowed our parents some time to get their shit back together.

They finally sat us down and told my sister and I what had happened to bring us here, why our parents were still in Texas.  Dad had been arrested for possesion of cocaine.  My uncle, his brother, got him a good lawyer, but the judge still gave him a year.  Mom was tying up the loose ends with the house and would be flying out as soon as she could. 

I knew what cocaine was, as much as any 9 year old can know.  I grew up during the early days of Nancy Regan's Just Say No campaign in the schools.  I would only find out over the coming years that in reality, I knew nothing about cocaine at the time, and would get a front row seat in how it will destroy a person, or people..  a family.

Mom surprised us.  We woke up one Saturday morning for breakfast at the table, something my grandparents insisted upon even though it was an alien concept to us when we arrived.  We had our backs to her when she came out of the shower with a towel spun on her head the way she always did.  I remember her words, and can hear her say them in my head as I write this. 

"There's my babies" in that booming, dominating voice of hers.  We nearly tore the table down and turned our chairs over in order to run to her and hug her.  We stayed like that for what seemed a long time.  The three of us, crying.  One year apart, and so suddenly reunited.  I was sure that the clouds had finally parted, that we were going to be alright, that we'd go back to living a life of normalcy, however still skewed compared to the other kids I knew.

She stayed with us for a few weeks while she looked for work.  Dad was still going to be 6 months from meeting up with us, and she wanted to have a house for us to move into when he got there.  When she found work, we saw less of her because of her hours.  When she'd saved enough, she went and found a small apartment.  We stayed with Nana and Pop, to ease her financial burden while she got back on her feet.  We saw her on the weekends, and that was ok, better than not at all.  The first question invariably out of my mouth when I saw her was "When can we come live with you"  The answer was always "soon" with no commitment on when "soon" would be.

We passed another summer with Nana and Pop, and the threat of another school year in a school I hated loomed.  I had not made friends, and in fact had made several enemies.  My mouth, it seemed, would write checks my ass couldn't cash..  or when I did cash the check, I'd end up making more enemies.  It didn't help me that my grandparents finally won out over my protests at their clothing choice, and sent me to school dressed like Bobby Brady.  When anyone made fun of my attire, I snapped back visciously, sometimes getting caught by a teacher and getting sent to the Principal's office.  This would be a trend I would carry with me up until my senior year in highschool: The kid who just couldn't keep his mouth shut.

When we were still living in Texas, and my father was still building show cars with his brother who owned the only corvette lot in our city and was very well off, he decided to tear down his jeep and rebuild it as a show jeep.  A 1976 CJ-5, it was painted matte green for much of my childhood, and we often would be taken for rides in the dunes with my parents and my fathers friends.  They'd park the 4x4's on the beach and build a bon fire out off Padre Island and camp out.  That jeep was as much a part of the family as any of us.  When he decided to rebuild it, he became a ghost.  He had his shop in the garage out back and we knew where to find him, but when my father worked, he worked with intensity, and was never really available to us.  When it was finally done, when every part had been painted, every bolt tightened, that Jeep was a sight to behold.  Blood red, black trim and roll bars..  Custom varnished cedar dashboard and console.  It had a winch on the front that looked like it could have towed a space shuttle.  My mother, ever the artist, even did the airbrushing of the CJ-5 logo on the side.  That 8 cylinder engine, when cranked up, sounded better than my mother's 69 Z-28 Camero, something I think my mother always hated or envied, even though her car was nothing to sneeze at.

It was a summer saturday on the day I heard that engine, from 4 blocks over, while my sister and I were playing in the woods behind Nana and Pops..  I'd have known it anywhere and would still to this day, had my mother not wrecked it a few years later and bent the frame, exiling it to rot for the next 15 years in one back yard after another, my father never having the will to rebuild what was once his masterpiece.

My sister hadn't heard it, so when I stopped and cocked my ear, knowing even without thinking that it could be only one engine, she looked at me and I could see that she hadn't figured it out.  I said "DAD!" and took off running.  After a second or two of what I imagine must have been confusion, she too heard the sound of that 8 cylider and came right on my heels. 

He'd barely pulled in and killed the engine before he was out of the Jeep (no doors, of course) and on his knees with his arms open.  We nearly bowled him over, or so I'd like to think, but my father was and always has had incredible strength, and I think the only reason he might have nearly fell was emotion..  raw emotion.  Looking back over my life as his son, emotion is not a trait I would associate with my father.  Even his rages seemed always calculated and thought out. 

We cried there in his arms, and he with us.  I had seen my father cry only once before, at his mother's funeral.  I wouldn't see him cry again for another 20 years, and we'd all be crying together then as well.

------------------------

I have to take another break from this for a little while.  I have dinner to cook and Dexter to watch.  I'll try and write more tomorrow.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Shit, this is powerful, moving stuff.

[Suu]

Keep writing, please. I think you really need this.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

We're all here for you man. Don't stop.

[Jasper]

Phew.  That was wrenching to read.  Can't imagine what it was like to write.

[Disco Pickle]

Even after our father was reunited with us, we were told that we needed to stay with Nana and Pop just a little while longer.  The apartment my mother found was too small for our needs, and they wanted some time to find a proper house, so we could go back to having our own bedrooms. 

Due to their limited finances, even with my father working 50 hour plus weeks, when they did find a place it was a modest double wide trailer on a large plot of land.  The owners lived in a small farm house further up the road.  This was an odd place to find a trailer, as the surrounding neighborhood had been suburbanized, turned into a housing complex several years before.  Naturally, all of the stigmatism that comes with being the only family living in a trailer surrounded by houses came to follow me.  I learned then that children are the most cruel of our species.  When given the opportunity to look down on those who have less, it seems they do not hesitate.  I did make one friend in the two years we lived in that trailer, and for that I was grateful.  I saw my first and only snow fall in '89.  I woke early and walked outside to an inch and a half of fresh snow.  The entire city shut down, and all of the bridges were closed, but my father took us out to a large empty parking lot and we did donuts in the jeep.  Things seemed to be going well for us, or as well as could be. 

We moved again 2 years later, way out to Palm Valley in the next county.  It was still fairly rural then, even with the Sawgrass and Marshlanding developments already looking to take over the landscape from A1A, beginning to change the names to Ponte Vedra.  I guess Palm Valley was too back woods Florida for them.

They had found a house to rent on the Intercoastal Waterway, with a dock and a large yard.  It was old and not very well kept, but it was perfect to me.  Even the prospect of changing schools yet again didn't bother me as long as we were together again.

My sister and I hadn't made any new friends since moving to Florida.  My grandparents house was rural for Jacksonville, and most of the neighborhood was retired couples.  Now, even though our new place exited onto the only artery through the area and traffic was regularly 45-50 MPH, we had the opportunity to make new friends in our new environment.  My sister was fortunate that our next door neighbors had 3 daughters, and she made fast friends.  I had to go farther afield, at least half a mile, but I found kids my own age who I got along with well.  Even the kids at my new school seemed friendly enough, and none of the problems from my previous school seemed to follow me.  We seemed happy for a time, this motley family of ours. 

We lived in that house a year.  I fished off the dock as often as I could, regularly baited a crab trap and pulled in blue crabs to boil for dinner.  I'd wake in the morning and take a perverse sense of pleasure walking around the live oaks that dominated our yard and tearing down the banana spider webs with a large stick.  The damn things terrified me, gigantic bird eaters they seemed to me then and to this day, if I walk face first into a spider web, I'll scream like a girl, imagining it was a banana spider that was in the web and was just then crawling into my collar and down my back.

We moved on New Years Day, 1992.  It was the middle of the school year, and we'd be changing schools yet again.  We moved into a house across the street from my fathers uncle, in a more urban area of the city known as Sin City.  Mostly upper lower class and lower class white and black families, in delapidated 50's and 60's housing.  It was in this house that I would meet who has become my closest friend and confidant.  It was also the house in which I would come to form a theory about my parents and their addictions, and the destruction it brought with it. 

I called this theory the 8 year rule, because up until the point when I finally moved away from my parents, at 15 years old, things had been managable.  They kept food on the table and the lights on.  My sister and I were not having to take baths at neighbors houses like we did in the last weeks in Texas.  But sometimes the veil between maintaining and collapsing is thin indeed.  It was the year I turned 16 that things once again collapsed, the cards came down, and and it was the last year I would ever live under the same roof with them.

[Jenne]

Wow.  Powerful stuff to read, so I can imagine writing it is even moreso...and gut-wrenching to boot.  Thank you for sharing it with us.

[The Great Pope of OUTSIDE]

I...think my dad saw that snow in the summer of '89. Weird.

[Disco Pickle]

We finished moving in the same day, New Years day 1992.  I had been to the neighborhood before and knew there were a lot of other kids who lived on the street.  I'd make new friends, as would my sister though the boys outnumbered the girls in the neighborhood.  One of the friends I made has been one of the only lasting friendships I've formed in my life, and we still hang out regularly to talk shit, trade jokes and jabs, rag on each other and he still lets me humiliate him in fighting games.  He still jokes about wanting to slip his tube steak into my sister, and I still joke that if she's even half as good as his mother was..  you get the picture.

Matt came from a divorced and remarried family and lived, along with his younger brother, with his father and step mother.  Over the next few years we'd be nearly inseparable, barring the occasional disagreement and fight.  Boy stuff mostly like fighting over a girl from the neighborhood.  It never lasted long.

It was during this time that my parents began to exhibit the behavior patterns of old.  Dad would come  home from work and they'd both disappear into their bedroom.  Mom would stay up until 4 or 5 drinking and watching TV.  Both of their tempers seemed to get shorter, and the fights were frequent, brief but loud, and occasionally violent.  A growing sense of despair seemed to cloud around my mother, and she would frequently ask us who we would rather live with, her or our father, should they separate.  I always resented this question, being forced to choose between the two of them based on a hypothetical future that I would learn was less and less likely to occur the older they got.  They were made for each other, in their own dark way.  Given enough time apart, they might have met some other who would accept them, but what I came to truly believe was that there was no one else in the would who would have put up with either of them, other than the two of them.  

It was 8th grade that I really started getting into serious trouble, both in school and out.  I'd already picked up smoking cigarettes, and had tried alcohol and found it to my liking.  Pot came soon after and I found a seemingly endless supply: my parent's.  What began as me pinching their sack became a sort of game when they figured out what was going on, but weren't yet ready to have that conversation with their child.  They'd move the hiding place around, and I'd search for it while they were at work.  They kept me on my toes, even going as far as to hide it inside a hollow, red, rubber dildo with a balled up sock stuffed in to cover it.  You'd be amazed the lengths a kid will go to when he's bored at home and wants to get high.

Matt's father and his mother became involved in a custody dispute after Matt was hospitalized after huffing freon.  I never participated in this with him, as it naturally scared the shit out of me.  He had asthma most of his life, and this incident put him in the hospital, and as close to death as he's ever been.

His mother eventually won the custody dispute, and Matt moved away during my freshman year in high school.  We would see each other every other weekend for the next few years, but really we had been separated for all intents and purposes.  I filled the void by befriending a series of kids who took greater and greater risks with both the law, and drugs.  I was introduced to LSD at 14, and took to it like a duck to water.  It became my drug of choice as an escape from the darkness I saw happening in my home.  My sister was smart enough to not try anything other than pot, and had very few friends to smoke it with.  Mostly she just stayed with friends in order to be out of the path of destruction that inevitably came a few hours after my father had gotten home and the drugs ran out.

The children of drug addicts are orphans, and we never felt it more in those last years leading up to my exodus and the second collapse of our household.