family’s collective psychosis. But then, five long years later, there I was at my mother’s doorstep. Of course, finding those letters at the bank had been the immediate and obvious push for me to go to her house, but my standing in front of my mom that day was something bigger than just that. It was as if my father’s death had abruptly reconfigured my existence within a larger genetic framework. The disintegration of my chromosomal matrix had triggered a need for reunion. Finding myself at my mother’s house only a handful of days after my father died, with the dead man’s ashes actually tucked under my arm no less, was primal chemistry asserting itself involuntarily.
It was like those freak instances when you stretch your back years and years after you did a particularly strong tab of acid, only to suddenly have the traces of illegal chemical stored dormant in your spinal fluid burst active into fullblown glory all over again. Like one of those glowsticks they sell at carnivals, snap , all you meant to do was adjust your alignment, but too bad because now you’ve got hallucinogens rushing your brain and you better just chill and enjoy the ride because you’re tripping and seriously spun.
My dad was dead and I missed my mom. I also missed the house I grew up in. I knew the actual fibers of that place by heart. I could walk from cluttered room to room closeeyed without crashing into a single object. Forget unrealistic regressed expectations of some saccharine Hallmark moment, that day I just wanted to be with my mother in her house.
But she was insane. My mother. Truly, she was insane.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Fucking bizarre question. But it got me thinking. Really, who was I? Where to begin? Let’s see, for starters …
Well, I’d been the human my mother gave birth to in a doomed love affair when she should have been focusing on her med school texts and clinics. And I’d been the toddler she said used to huddle under the kitchen table with an upset stomach in a graduate housing apartment when insults and pots and pans flew through the air. I’d also been the three-year-old whom she, one day when my father was at work, snuck onto a plane and took back with her to Southern California.
And three years later—when she, by then the star member of the acclaimed UCLA surgery residency program, fell in love with a young hotshot anesthesiologist she met on rounds while extracting the compressed shit out of an old man—I’d been the six-year-old she brought along into marriage. My mother’s husband was the only child of a wealthy political family—his revered mother, a lawyer like her husband, had been a member of President Carter’s cabinet. Add to it all, my stepfather was towheaded and as Waspy as could be. My mother’s mother finally approved. We existed in her world again. Our future seemed golden.
I remember thinking I was some sort of royalty when my Prince Charm new stepfather told me I could call him “Chip” as he drove us, his perfect little insta-family, in his cherry-red 1978 Porsche 911 SC Targa to his fancy Laguna Hills home. I’d gone from living in my grandmother’s barrio home to living in a multimillion-dollar estate with my own swimming pool and Jacuzzi and private hilltop view.
My father, who had relocated back to Southern California to be close to me and to fight for custody, was a burdensome reminder to my mother of her old life. For a year, each time I returned to the fancy house from my father’s court-mandated every-other-weekend and Wednesday night visitation privileges, I was required to strip down to my underwear in the foyer. My mother took my clothes and sleepover bag and placed them in a sealed trash bag in the garage for a day before “disinfecting” them twice in the washing machine with bleach at the hottest setting. She said she did this to kill cockroach eggs on my clothes. I had made the mistake of telling my mother once that I’d seen a giant cockroach
It was like those freak instances when you stretch your back years and years after you did a particularly strong tab of acid, only to suddenly have the traces of illegal chemical stored dormant in your spinal fluid burst active into fullblown glory all over again. Like one of those glowsticks they sell at carnivals, snap , all you meant to do was adjust your alignment, but too bad because now you’ve got hallucinogens rushing your brain and you better just chill and enjoy the ride because you’re tripping and seriously spun.
My dad was dead and I missed my mom. I also missed the house I grew up in. I knew the actual fibers of that place by heart. I could walk from cluttered room to room closeeyed without crashing into a single object. Forget unrealistic regressed expectations of some saccharine Hallmark moment, that day I just wanted to be with my mother in her house.
But she was insane. My mother. Truly, she was insane.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Fucking bizarre question. But it got me thinking. Really, who was I? Where to begin? Let’s see, for starters …
Well, I’d been the human my mother gave birth to in a doomed love affair when she should have been focusing on her med school texts and clinics. And I’d been the toddler she said used to huddle under the kitchen table with an upset stomach in a graduate housing apartment when insults and pots and pans flew through the air. I’d also been the three-year-old whom she, one day when my father was at work, snuck onto a plane and took back with her to Southern California.
And three years later—when she, by then the star member of the acclaimed UCLA surgery residency program, fell in love with a young hotshot anesthesiologist she met on rounds while extracting the compressed shit out of an old man—I’d been the six-year-old she brought along into marriage. My mother’s husband was the only child of a wealthy political family—his revered mother, a lawyer like her husband, had been a member of President Carter’s cabinet. Add to it all, my stepfather was towheaded and as Waspy as could be. My mother’s mother finally approved. We existed in her world again. Our future seemed golden.
I remember thinking I was some sort of royalty when my Prince Charm new stepfather told me I could call him “Chip” as he drove us, his perfect little insta-family, in his cherry-red 1978 Porsche 911 SC Targa to his fancy Laguna Hills home. I’d gone from living in my grandmother’s barrio home to living in a multimillion-dollar estate with my own swimming pool and Jacuzzi and private hilltop view.
My father, who had relocated back to Southern California to be close to me and to fight for custody, was a burdensome reminder to my mother of her old life. For a year, each time I returned to the fancy house from my father’s court-mandated every-other-weekend and Wednesday night visitation privileges, I was required to strip down to my underwear in the foyer. My mother took my clothes and sleepover bag and placed them in a sealed trash bag in the garage for a day before “disinfecting” them twice in the washing machine with bleach at the hottest setting. She said she did this to kill cockroach eggs on my clothes. I had made the mistake of telling my mother once that I’d seen a giant cockroach
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