Bare Bones (3 page)

Mountain Pine is a pretty town to look at, and I had a lot of fun growing up there. But it was a pretty impoverished place. I don't actually remember a movie theater or hotel, even though the Internet tells me they were there. All I remember is the Yum Yum shop, with a broken pool table, and Parthenas general store, where we used food stamps to buy hamburgers.

We made fun however we could. My buddy Scotty had the town Nintendo, meaning he was the only one in Mountain Pine who could afford the video game console. So we'd all gather at Scotty's and jockey to get into games of Tecmo Bowl or Double Dribble. Scotty was the man because of that! And he remains one of my dear friends to this day. Mostly because he still has a Nintendo.

I was a trailer kid for a lot of my life. But I lived in very few trailer parks. In trailer parks, where there can be thirty trailers crammed in beside each other on fifteen lots, everyone is in each other's business, for good and bad. When you don't have much, you need people more but trust them even less, and because of this trailer parks can have more drama than a Lifetime movie. But we weren't trailer park people; we were single-trailer-in-the-woods people. Like with lawns vs. woods, there's a difference—and it's price. Renting a trailer in the woods is cheaper. We had to do anything we could to save a buck, since our main source of income was my mom's welfare and my grandma's Social Security check. Those who the talking heads on the news called “leeches on America,” that was us.

My mom struggled. A high school dropout, she turned sixteen on March 8, 1980, and gave birth to me on April 2. How could she have done anything other than struggle? When I was little, she bounced around from job to job, never working anywhere more than part-time and never long term. She did a brief stint at a rent-to-own store, a concept many readers might not be familiar with unless they grew up broke like me. Let me take a minute to explain. When you want something, like a TV, but can't afford said TV, you can use layaway (which we did a lot). You pay it off with no interest but only get the TV when you finish paying. With rent-to-own, you get the TV, but—there's always a but—there's a heavy interest tacked on top of the original price. So you're basically renting until you own it (or the store takes it back). She didn't last there too long. I think being around all these things she couldn't have just bummed her out.

Mom also waited tables for a while at Hunan's, a local Chinese restaurant. The biggest perk of the job was that I had free Mongolian beef every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night for about a year. That was the longest time I remember her holding a job. Usually they only lasted for a couple of weeks and then she'd get fired or quit.

Like the Mongolian beef that was my main source of nutrition for a good thirteen months, if something was there for free, we got it. At Christmas, other families from the local church would drop off boxes of donations at our trailer, apartment, or wherever we were living, so that we would have gifts for the holiday. I knew it was charity, but it didn't bother me. Not yet realizing that people felt sorry for me, I was just happy to get a present.

What did bother me, though, was watching my mom steal food when we went grocery shopping. I dreaded going to the Piggly Wiggly or Food 4 Less because I knew at some point Mom was going to have to take out the heap of brightly colored construction paper they called food stamps back then. Now, when you receive welfare benefits you swipe a card that looks like a credit or debit card. Back then we used to have to peel off big pieces of yellow, purple, or red paper, representing different denominations, which could be seen from a mile away. We were basically screaming, “Here we are with our construction paper money. That's right, we're poor!” Counting off the stamps at the cash register was humiliating. But food stamps meant food, and you had to take what you could get. Like I always say, “Gotta eat.”

Unfortunately I guess the stamps weren't enough, because my mom also stole. In her own take on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, I watched her go into a section where there weren't any people (i.e., not the deli counter, where there was always somebody around). After looking left and right—her small dark features scanning the aisles from under her curly dark hair to make sure the coast was clear—she grabbed an item and slipped it into her purse and then a few more into the American flag leather jacket she hardly ever took off. There was no getting dressed up for things where we came from. When I was a kid, getting dressed up meant your jeans weren't dirty and your shirt had a button somewhere on it. But my mom was sure proud of that red, white, and blue leather jacket. I loved it, too. It was leather. And American. What could be cooler than that?

It also provided the perfect hiding place for the one or two grocery items she carried unnoticed out of the store on her petite frame. Usually she took nonperishable stuff, canned food, like Manwich. My mom would steal a lot of Manwich.

If you don't know what Manwich is this might not be the book for you, but if you're curious, google it. While I was growing up, it was basically one of the food groups, which in my house were as follows:

 
Generic brands of cereal, such as Fruit Hoops (not Froot Loops) and Honey Squares (not Honeycomb)

 
Manwich, which covered our protein intake

 
Sunny Delight

 
And white bread. Lots of white bread. White bread with mustard was a mustard sandwich, and they were good.

Back to my mom: I was so mad at her, because she was stealing. And we were taught stealing was wrong. But I never said anything to her about this. I'm pretty sure she knew I knew what she did, but she never talked about it with me, either. Instead, she loaded the groceries into the car, turned on the radio, and drove home.

The issue was, I knew Mom didn't steal for fun. The issue was far more complicated than a simple case of right and wrong. Yes, stealing was bad. I learned that at school, at church, on TV. Yet even I could understand that welfare only went so far. If she didn't take those things from the store, my sister, grandma, and I wouldn't have enough to eat. Was it wrong to steal if it was to feed your family? I wasn't sure. It was confusing.

I wondered if other kids' parents stole. Trying to make sense of this moral gray zone, I asked a friend at school, “Does your mom ever try to sneak stuff out of the grocery store?” He thought I was kidding. Or maybe he didn't and was trying to hide his embarrassment for me. Either way, the fact that what my mom was doing was not the norm was an awful realization.

The shame I felt in that moment outpaced anything I experienced watching my mom shove a Velveeta down her pants. My mom might have been doing what she needed to in order to get by, but it still wasn't what ordinary folks did. I never asked anyone about that again.

To her credit, I never saw my mother steal anything that we didn't need. By that I mean she wasn't stealing alcohol. And, trust me, she had awful issues with alcohol.

On occasion, she came home really drunk and stumbled around. But mostly she took her medicine in a slow drip. Most every night she sat in her chair in the living room, watching her shows and drinking a twelve-pack of Busch. I know because I never had a bedroom in any of the places we lived, so I used to sleep on the living room couch, where things were always happening around me, mostly my mom drinking night after night until she passed out in front of the television. After I was done with my homework and ready to go to bed, I'd change into my pajamas (read: shorts) from the “closet” under my bed where I kept all my clothes and take the sheets and comforter that I had folded up and crammed beside the couch in the morning to make up my bed. Then I'd fall asleep to the TV blaring (which is why to this very day I can't sleep without it). In the morning when I got up for school, sometimes my mom was still there in that chair, sometimes not.

It might seem depressing reading this now. Hell, it's kind of depressing to write it. But at the time, it was just everyday. In some sort of twisted version of a lullaby, I didn't mind drifting off to
The Golden Girls
or
Roseanne,
punctuated by the occasional pop of another Busch being cracked open. That was how I knew my mom. My mom struggled, but I loved her. The tricky part was gauging her moods. In other words, I never knew what kind of mood she would be in, ever. There were some times when she came home from wherever she'd been smiling and singing (she could actually sing pretty well and loved to do it; I didn't get that gene). She'd give me a hug and I knew the world was a fine place.

Just as often, though, the world was terrible, and during those times my mom was dark and sullen. She would lock down, showing no emotion and refusing to interact with anyone. If you tried to talk to her, she would snap and get angry for no apparent reason until she eventually disappeared into her bedroom. This was a time before bipolar existed, or at least before people in Arkansas knew it existed. When you have trouble paying for shoes, you don't have the expendable income to spend on a therapist.

I never knew what precipitated her bad moods. It wasn't like she sunk into them because she lost a job, had a fight with a friend, or anything else specific. They seemed to come and go without warning and be completely out of her control. I never trusted that I knew what or how my mom was feeling. So I figured I would control the only thing I could: myself. If she wasn't in a good place, I made sure to stay out of the way. During those times I didn't talk to her at all because she got angry quickly. And because I never could trust or predict what mood she would be in, I really didn't engage with my mom much in general.

All I wanted to do was stay out of the way, shove any traces of my existence into hidden corners like I did my sheets and comforter beside my couch. My mom had enough problems without me adding to them. And the best way for me to take up as little space or attention at home as possible was to be alone. I started doing everything by myself as soon as I could get around and was smart enough to figure out how. I rode my bike to school starting in second grade, played by myself, did my homework alone, and put myself to bed.