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eastcoastboyos · 3 months

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Pivot

Unable to sleep, Joel and I get out of the warm tent and decide to wander the darkness. On our way down the creepy boardwalk, we tepidly dodge blades of grass, having been traumatized from the earlier tick running up my leg. We make our way to the beach and it is empty, dark, and ominous but lit by a full starry sky. We chat and stargaze.

Poor Dylan is fully sick now and can't be getting the best sleep. He borrows one of Joel's eye masks. Allen is also not 100% and craves the AC of the van and hotel. The day's low is 28C. The tent is warm and uncomfortable.

In the morning, Joel and I awaken by the light and sneak out of the tent again, letting the others continue sleeping. We walk to the ocean more and wade into the water. After some convincing, Joel joins me in jumping into the ocean and we enjoy the renvigoration of the waves that remind us of West Edmonton Mall Water Park. The beach is beautiful and empty of the off road trucks that saturated it the day prior.

Assembling ourselves, we mosie to the ferry terminal to Ocracoke Island. We scrounge for coffee, which Joel finds via a vending machine, and meander the nearby shops. We talk relationships on the ferry while dodging sea spit and watch the seagulls ride the air flow above the ferry. Allen zonks out and snoozes in the van. The group decides they don't really want to camp another day in the incessant heat, and Joel books a spur of the moment hotel in Jacksonville, NC.

Orcacoke is an interesting island. All the locals drive golf carts around which we evny in the hot sun. Most buildings are on stilts or owned by rental companies. Seeking food, we stop at Smacnallys for fish sandwiches and plates of shrimp. We do a bit of shopping in the sunny heat and Joel is unfortunately scammed a tip at a local ice cream shop. Joel gives them a calm but firm piece of his mind, and after 15 minutrs of walking, we see a $1.30 reimbursement show up on his email.

After checking out the local lghthouse, we retreat into the van. Dylan, Joel, and I are sunburnt. The group starts to slow down. Waiting around the next ferry terminal, we explore the local fauna and restrooms. Joel entertains me with facts on the meaning of the word "Horizontal and puns like "Imma lichen this bench". Dylan becomes addicted to trader Joe's Licorice.

Arriving back at the mainland, the sun is setting. Our GPS starts going wonky so we have to disconnect and Joel navigates verbally. The surfboard on top of the Jeep in front of us almost flies off and someone is lighting off fireworks near the glass station. We are eager to get to our hotel, but still are over an hour away.

Picking up aloe vera at a massive Walmart, Dylan and Allen are pretty much spent. The mood is low but functional, and we are forced to the drive through of a Wendy's once we realize their doors are not open. Watching cockroaches outside, the staff inform us they are out of chicken and we pivot to beef. Allen is zonked and sleeping again (Sleepytime Tylenol coming in clutch) and the rest of us swap work stories having perked up with food.

The hotel is cheap but cool ❄️. Joel, Blake, and I inspect what appears to be pubes on a bedroom door. I discover that I have left my stinky shoes in my suitcase the entire day seasoning in the hot van, and my clothes smell like ass. Blake and Joel sip beers. Time for bed.

Derek

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ramblingcecimonster · 4 months

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On the Train to Success

The night sky turns gray with the ache of dawn and I watch a tired young couple pass a cup of coffee and a lit cigarette back and forth on their postage stamp scrap of a porch that looks like the gentlest of breezes could detach it from their trailer. We don’t make eye contact or anything, but something about their expressions, in the split second before the train rambles speedily down the track, is familiar to me. I can imagine a colicky baby finally sleeping or a sick toddler whose fever finally broke, a pile of bills, a car that needs gas, an empty fridge. I know what white trash looks like, what “trying our best,” “secondhand furniture,” “buy one get one free sale,” “too much month at the end of our money” look like. Sure, we wear it like pride: hard-working folks, trying our best, willing to bend over backwards for our neighbors. Wearing dusty shoes and worn-out jeans and fixing whatever just broke until it literally cain’t be fixed no more. But it’s a tired existence. Hungry. Worn.

It's an existence I don’t know from childhood. It’s not how I grew up. I grew up with polo shirts and golf sweaters and country clubs and new cars and back-to-school shopping at the LL Bean. We never went to the Walmart. We never cussed or ate day old food or had holes in our shoes. I didn’t know what a factory looked like, but I went on vacation twice a year. I grew up with angry parents who absolutely knew better. (Some folks ain’t got resources, they’re just doing what’s always been done, raising their babies up the way they were raised, with no knowledge that giving your kid soda in a baby bottle or sending them out for a switch really ain’t what to do. They don’t necessarily know not to expose their kids to drugs or alcohol or driving without a license or whatever else it was that my folks looked down their noses at. If their kids went to bed without dinner, it was because there weren’t money for dinner, not because their kids did something wrong. They aren’t bad people, they ain’t bad parents, and they love their kids. They just ain’t got no money and they don’t know better than the only life they’ve ever known. My parents weren’t those kind of parents.) They knew better than to starve their teenager or to keep their fourth grader up all night as punishment. They knew better than to punish any expression of emotion with psychiatric medications and trips to a private psychiatric hospital. They knew better than to keep me isolated, gaslit, and terrified. But they did it anyway. In our ivory tower, silver spoon world, as long as you wore the “right” clothes and said the “right” words, if your parents went to church on Sundays and volunteered their time and had you in youth soccer or Boy Scouts and were good enough at lying, nobody questioned everything. I learned not to trust the cops not because my parents’ car insurance expired 4 months ago or whatever else it is that law enforcement likes to punish poor folks for because they’re poor. I learned not to trust cops because when I ran away from home after being spat on and getting kicked in the head at 14 years old for taking food from the pantry because I was starving, the cop wanted to know why a kid from such a nice home and such a nice family would run away like that. Because my parents labeled me the problem, a liar, and not to be trusted, so I knew nothing I said would be believed or even matter. I watched my abusers lie straight to the police officer’s face, and knew in that moment that the whole system was a sham.

But I was nonetheless raised to believe that poor people were somehow a problem, that they were morally deficient. So imagine my surprise when the family that came to my rescue when I got summarily kicked out at 16 by the suburban couple from hell was a truck driver and a high school teacher. Poor, tired, with lines on their faces and miles and miles on their shoes. My new mama worried loudly. It was no secret that she worried about every last one of her babies – about our grades, our futures, our relationships, our emotional states. We are the same person, and the older I get the more I open my mouth and the words I find leaving my throat are just TL. Mama G with a little more therapy under the belt and far more colorful hair tendencies. She taught high school English at a military boarding school, so she knows a thing or two about angry teenagers and how to navigate the emotional hell of abandoned children. I knew her first, recognized her as safe first. With her black pencil skirts and schoolmarm bun, standing stock still at my track meets because sometimes all you need is someone who is there. She cooked like a maestro, picked out nail polish colors, introduced me to Patrick Swayze, drank cheap beer, and watched baseball in a way that involved far more screaming than I was used to. She loved summer nights and all her babies and hated the cold and the fact that her husband smoked.

But my daddy is a different breed of human. Quietly there. There’s a quote in one of my favorite books, about a young girl’s adoptive father. “Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness. The girl knew from the outset that Hans Huberman would always appear midscream, and he would not leave” (Markus Zusak, The Book Thief). I was a hurt, angry, insomniac teenager. I was lost and lonely and broken. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, he was there in the living room, watching some horrible made-for-tv action movie or crime drama. We watched most of Criminal Minds together in that quiet living room. We didn’t speak, but sometimes we’d go do the grocery shopping at Walmart at the crack of dawn before anyone else in the house was awake, me in my superhero pajamas and him in his cargo pants and t-shirt – the same outfit he’s worn nearly every day of my entire life. We’d stop for sweet tea at the McDonald’s on the way home. I helped him fix the cars and he existed. A phone call away. He called me Missy and I called him Dude. He spoke my language, the language of broken and angry and abandoned teenager. His there-ness, his appearance on the other end of my phone in the middle of every panicked scream assured me that as bad as it got sometimes, it would never be as bad as it once was. He told me with a laugh that he was born white trash, and he’d die white trash, and there wasn’t a lot he could do about it in the meantime. He budgeted and scrapped and saved nails and screws and stripped wire. He worried quietly.

A friend of mine joked, when I was fresh out of college and trying desperately to figure out how to actually be a human person who understood relationships and emotions and how to live in a world that terrified the shit out of me, that I was like Athena. That one morning, Craig had woken up with a headache to beat the band, and then I popped out of his skull, fully formed, angry, and ready for war. I was on a battlefield against the world, against myself, against anyone who might try to hurt me. Some days, I wonder if Zeus ever worried about Athena the way I know my daddy worried about me. Did Zeus ever wonder what his tired, angry daughter might be like if he had been given the time to raise her up the way she ought to have been raised? To channel that righteous furious energy into something beautiful, like the drums or boxing or who-knows-what. To tell his brilliant, decisive, strategic daughter that it was okay to take a deep breath and trust the world a little. Did Zeus ever worry that it was too late for all that? That his war-torn daughter was already too covered in her own blood to be able to take a full breath and wash it all clean.

Because I know Craig worried about me. I know he still does. I know the face of world-worn, tired parents on a middle-of-nowhere back porch drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes they meant to quit 10 years ago is familiar. It’s familiar the same way “Hey Missy, whatcha doin’?” is familiar, the same way the smell of old spice and Marlboros on the coat you wear to go haul the dog back inside because it’s the one closest to the door and it’s 10pm and it’s January is familiar. He worries about this child born of fury and fear might tumble headlong into something, eyes closed, head first, can’t lose, that they can’t find their way out of. That maybe my heart won’t stop beating a little too fast, that the drumbeat I run to is just a little too off step, that one day someone will try to convince me I didn’t deserve to be free. He won’t ever really say, but when you’ve spent hours in silence with someone while you were learning to be a human person, you learn to read their expression, their voice. The way they pretend not to cry on the day of your college graduation or on the day you drive away from their house with a U-Haul holding all of your worldly possessions attached to your Jeep on the way to California. The way they know you’re having a panic attack over the phone before you’ve even said anything, they way their voice catches just a little bit when you tell them you got into the PhD program. The way their eyes change just a little when you start talking about your something and they tell every store they deliver to how smart and wonderful their kid is.

So, when I saw that dawn-tired young couple, and imagined them a child and a sea of bills to pay, on a train on my way to a conference where I’m presenting twice, I may not have known them, but I recognized them. I recognized them in the way my daddy looks at the sky to ponder the weather while he’s rebuilding the deck after my mama fell through, in the way he checks the route and the road conditions and the name of the hotel and asks what day I’m presenting when I head to a conference in a city he’s never been to do, to do things he hardly ever imagined possible. I recognized them in the dreams they have for their hypothetical, imaginary child. I recognized them in the way you can’t pretend you don’t have an accent, but you read the etiquette books and know all the right things to say and read and research relentlessly and watch your child accomplish things that you – and they – never thought were possible. I recognized them in the way the smoke curled but never took away the worry; the way some things just line your face a little more every year and when it’s four in the morning on a foggy fall morning and your kid is just doing the best they can, the only thing you have left to do is smoke and drink your coffee and hope you did enough. Worry the way I’m sure Zeus never did, but the way that I know Craig always will, that it won’t be enough, that being there, perpetually and permanently there won’t be enough.

But to me, to me and for my tired and worrying and world-worn parents, for that young couple outside my train window and all the trailer trash, poor, working class parents out there doing your best to put one foot in front of the other and make it to the end of the month without running out of money… some things are as lasting as the moon and the tides, and one of those is the act of not leaving. Of being there, of worrying the way Zeus never did, of doing the best with what you have to make sure that your kids – even, and perhaps especially, the angry, hurt, and terrified ones – know that you are there. That you will not leave them. That they are worth the world.

#story #writing #short stories #memoir #essay #white trash #poor #trailer trash #cigarettes #parents #childhood trauma #child abuse #appalachia #zeus #athena #success #adoption

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