Hillbilly Elegy (11 page)

In Jackson, among old friends and real hillbillies, she needed no filter. At her brother's funeral a few years earlier, Mamaw and her niece Denise convinced themselves that one of the pallbearers was a pervert, so they broke into his funeral home office and searched through his belongings. They found an extensive magazine collection, including a few issues of
Beaver Hunt
(a periodical that I can assure you has nothing to do with aquatic mammals). Mamaw found it hilarious. “Fucking
Beaver Hunt
!” she'd roar.
“Who comes up with this shit?” She and Denise hatched a plot to take the magazines home and mail them to the pallbearer's wife. After a short deliberation, she changed her mind. “With my luck,” she told me, “we'll get in a crash on the way back to Ohio and the police will find these damned things in my trunk. I'll be damned if I'm going to go out with everyone thinking I was a lesbian—and a perverted one at that!” So they threw the magazines away to “teach that pervert a lesson” and never spoke of it again. This side of Mamaw rarely showed itself outside of Jackson.

Deaton's funeral home in Jackson—where she'd stolen those
Beaver Hunt
s—was organized like a church. In the center of the building was a main sanctuary flanked by larger rooms with couches and tables. On the other two sides were hallways with exits to a few smaller rooms—offices for staff, a tiny kitchen, and bathrooms. I've spent much of my life in that tiny funeral home, saying goodbye to aunts and uncles and cousins and great-grandparents. And whether she went to Deaton's to bury an old friend, a brother, or her beloved mother, Mamaw greeted every guest, laughed loudly, and cursed proudly.

So it was a surprise to me when, during Papaw's visitation, I went searching for comfort and found Mamaw alone in a corner of the funeral home, recharging batteries that I never knew could go empty. She stared blankly at the floor, her fire replaced with something unfamiliar. I knelt before her and laid my head in her lap and said nothing. At that moment, I realized that Mamaw was not invincible.

In hindsight, it's clear that there was more than grief to both Mamaw's and Mom's behavior. Lindsay, Matt, and Mamaw did their best to hide it from me. Mamaw forbade me to stay at
Mom's, under the ruse that Mamaw needed me with her as she grieved. Perhaps they hoped to give me a little space to mourn Papaw. I don't know.

I didn't see at first that something had veered off course. Papaw was dead, and everyone processed it differently. Lindsay spent a lot of time with her friends and was always on the move. I stayed as close to Mamaw as possible and read the Bible a lot. Mom slept more than usual, and I figured this was her way of coping. At home, she lacked even a modicum of temper control. Lindsay failed to do the dishes properly, or forgot to take out the dog, and Mom's anger poured out: “My dad was the only one who really understood me!” she'd scream. “I've lost him, and you're not making this any easier!” Mom had always had a temper, though, so I dismissed even this.

Mom seemed bothered that anyone but her was grieving. Aunt Wee's grief was unjustified, because Mom and Papaw had a special bond. So, too, was Mamaw's, for she didn't even like Papaw and chose not to live under the same roof. Lindsay and I needed to get over ourselves, for it was Mom's father, not ours, who had just died. The first indication that our lives were about to change came one morning when I woke and strolled over to Mom's house, where I knew Lindsay and Mom were sleeping. I went first to Lindsay's room, but she was asleep in my room instead. I knelt beside her, woke her up, and she hugged me tightly. After a little while, she said earnestly, “We'll get through this, J.”—that was her nickname for me—“I promise.” I still have no idea why she slept in my room that night, but I would soon learn what she promised we'd get through.

A few days after the funeral, I walked onto Mamaw's front porch, looked down the street, and saw an incredible commotion.
Mom was standing in a bath towel in her front yard, screaming at the only people who truly loved her: to Matt, “You're a fucking loser nobody”; to Lindsay, “You're a selfish bitch, he was my dad, not yours, so stop acting like you just lost your father”; to Tammy, her unbelievably kind friend who was secretly gay, “The only reason you act like my friend is because you want to fuck me.” I ran over and begged Mom to calm down, but by then a police cruiser was already on the scene. I arrived on the front porch as a police officer grabbed Mom's shoulders and she collapsed on the ground, struggling and kicking. Then the officer grabbed Mom and carried her to the cruiser, and she fought the whole way. There was blood on the porch, and someone said that she had tried to cut her wrists. I don't think the officer arrested her, though I don't know what happened. Mamaw arrived on the scene and took Lindsay and me with her. I remember thinking that if Papaw were here, he would know what to do.

Papaw's death cast light upon something that had previously lurked in the shadows. Only a kid could have missed the writing on the wall, I suppose. A year earlier, Mom had lost her job at Middletown Hospital after Rollerblading through the emergency room. At the time I saw Mom's bizarre behavior as the consequence of her divorce from Bob. Similarly, Mamaw's occasional references to Mom “getting loaded” seemed like random comments of a woman known for her willingness to say anything, not a diagnosis of a deteriorating reality. Not long after Mom lost her job, during my trip to California, I heard from her just once. I had no idea that, behind the scenes, the adults—meaning Mamaw on the one hand and Uncle Jimmy and his wife, Aunt Donna, on the other—were debating whether I should move permanently to California.

Mom flailing and screaming in the street was the culmination of the things I hadn't seen. She'd begun taking prescription narcotics not long after we moved to Preble County. I believe the problem started with a legitimate prescription, but soon enough, Mom was stealing from her patients and getting so high that turning an emergency room into a skating rink seemed like a good idea. Papaw's death turned a semi-functioning addict into a woman unable to follow the basic norms of adult behavior.

In this way, Papaw's death permanently altered the trajectory of our family. Before his death, I had settled into the chaotic but happy routine of splitting time between Mom's and Mamaw's. Boyfriends came and went, Mom had good days and bad, but I always had an escape route. With Papaw gone and Mom in rehab at the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment—or “the CAT house,” as we called it—I began to feel myself a burden. Though she never said anything to make me feel unwanted, Mamaw's life had been a constant struggle: From the poverty of the holler to Papaw's abuse, from Aunt Wee's teenage marriage to Mom's rap sheet, Mamaw had spent the better part of her seven decades managing crises. And now, when most people her age were enjoying the fruits of retirement, she was raising two teenage grandchildren. Without Papaw to help her, that burden seemed twice as heavy. In the months after Papaw's death, I remembered the woman I found in an isolated corner of Deaton's funeral home and couldn't shake the feeling that, no matter what aura of strength Mamaw projected, that other woman lived somewhere inside her.

So instead of retreating to Mamaw's house, or calling her every time problems arose with Mom, I relied on Lindsay and on myself. Lindsay was a recent high school graduate, and I had just started seventh grade, but we made it work. Sometimes
Matt or Tammy brought us food, but we largely fended for ourselves: Hamburger Helper, TV dinners, Pop-Tarts, and breakfast cereal. I'm not sure who paid the bills (probably Mamaw). We didn't have a lot of structure—Lindsay once came home from work to find me hanging out with a couple of her friends, all of us drunk—but in some ways we didn't need it. When Lindsay learned that I got the beer from a friend of hers, she didn't lose her cool or laugh at the indulgence; she kicked everyone out and then lectured me on substance abuse.

We saw Mamaw often, and she asked about us constantly. But we both enjoyed the independence, and I think we enjoyed the feeling that we burdened no one except perhaps each other. Lindsay and I had grown so good at managing crises, so emotionally stoic even as the very planet seemed to lose its cool, that taking care of ourselves seemed easy. No matter how much we loved Mom, our lives were easier with one less person to care for.

Did we struggle? Certainly. We received one letter from the school district informing us that I had collected so many unexcused absences that my parents might be summoned before the school or even prosecuted by the city. We found this letter hilarious: One of my parents had already faced a prosecution of sorts and hardly possessed any walking-around liberty, while the other was sufficiently off the grid that “summoning” him would require some serious detective work. We also found it frightening: Without a legal guardian around to sign the letter, we didn't know what the hell to do. But as we had with other challenges, we improvised. Lindsay forged Mom's signature, and the school district stopped sending letters home.

On designated weekdays and weekends, we visited our mother at the CAT house. Between the hills of Kentucky, Mamaw and
her guns, and Mom's outbursts, I thought that I had seen it all. But Mom's newest problem exposed me to the underworld of American addiction. Wednesdays were always dedicated to a group activity—some type of training for the family. All of the addicts and their families sat in a large room with each family assigned to an individual table, engaged in some discussion meant to teach us about addiction and its triggers. In one session, Mom explained that she used drugs to escape the stress of paying bills and to dull the pain of Papaw's death. In another, Lindsay and I learned that standard sibling conflict made it more difficult for Mom to resist temptation.

These sessions provoked little more than arguments and raw emotion, which I suppose was their purpose. On the nights when we sat in that giant hall with other families—all of whom were either black or Southern-accented whites like us—we heard screaming and fighting, children telling their parents that they hated them, sobbing parents begging forgiveness in one breath and then blaming their families in the next. It was there that I first heard Lindsay tell Mom how she resented having to play the caretaker in the wake of Papaw's death instead of grieving for him, how she hated watching me grow attached to some boyfriend of Mom's only to see him walk out on us. Perhaps it was the setting, or perhaps it was the fact that Lindsay was almost eighteen, but as my sister confronted my mother, I began to see my sister as the real adult. And our routine at home only enhanced her stature.

Mom's rehab proceeded apace, and her condition apparently improved with time. Sundays were designated as unstructured family time: We couldn't take Mom off-site, but we were able to eat and watch TV and talk as normal. Sundays were usually
happy, though Mom did angrily chide us during one visit because our relationship with Mamaw had grown too close. “I'm your mother, not her,” she told us. I realized that Mom had begun to regret the seeds she'd sown with Lindsay and me.

When Mom came home a few months later, she brought a new vocabulary along with her. She regularly recited the Serenity Prayer, a staple of addiction circles in which the faithful ask God for the “serenity to accept the things [they] cannot change.” Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn't judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn't judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family. Oddly enough, it's probably both: Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it. Mom was telling herself the truth, but the truth was not setting her free.

I didn't believe in any of the slogans or sentiments, but I did believe she was trying. Addiction treatment seemed to give Mom a sense of purpose, and it gave us something to bond over. I read what I could on her “disease” and even made a habit of attending some of her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which proceeded precisely as you'd expect: a depressing conference room, a dozen or so chairs, and a bunch of strangers sitting in a circle, introducing themselves as “Bob, and I'm an addict.” I thought that if I participated, she might actually get better.

At one meeting a man walked in a few minutes late, smelling like a garbage can. His matted hair and dirty clothes evidenced a life on the streets, a truth he confirmed as soon as he opened his mouth. “My kids won't speak to me; no one will,” he told us. “I
scrounge together what money I can and spend it on smack. Tonight I couldn't find any money or any smack, so I came in here because it looked warm.” The organizer asked if he'd be willing to try giving up the drugs for more than one night, and the man answered with admirable candor: “I could say yes, but honestly, probably not. I'll probably be back at it tomorrow night.”

I never saw that man again. Before he left, someone did ask him where he was from. “Well, I've lived here in Hamilton for most of my life. But I was born down in eastern Kentucky, Owsley County.” At the time, I didn't know enough about Kentucky geography to tell the man that he had been born no more than twenty miles from my grandparents' childhood home.

By the time I finished eighth grade, Mom had been sober for at least a year, and she'd been dating Matt for two or three years. I was doing well in school, and Mamaw had taken a couple vacations—one trip to California to visit Uncle Jimmy and another to Las Vegas with her friend Kathy. Lindsay had married soon after Papaw's death. I loved her husband, Kevin, and still do, for a simple reason: He never mistreated her. That's all I ever wanted in a mate for my sister. Just under a year after their wedding, Lindsay gave birth to her son, Kameron. She was a mom, and a damn good one at that. I was proud of her, and I adored my new nephew. Aunt Wee also had two small children, which gave me three little kids to dote on. I saw all of this as a sign of family renewal. The summer before high school was thus a hopeful one.

That same summer, however, Mom announced that I'd be moving in with Matt in his Dayton home. I liked Matt, and by then Mom had lived in Dayton with him for a little while. But Dayton was a forty-five-minute drive from Mamaw's, and Mom made it clear that she wanted me to attend school in Dayton. I
liked my life in Middletown—I wanted to attend the high school, I loved my friends, and although it was a bit unconventional, I enjoyed splitting time between Mom's and Mamaw's houses during the week and hanging out with Dad on the weekends. Importantly, I could always go to Mamaw's house if I needed to, and that made all the difference. I remembered life when I didn't have that safety valve, and I didn't want to go back to those days. Moreover, any move would be without Lindsay and Kameron. So when Mom made her announcement about moving in with Matt, I belted out, “Absolutely not,” and stormed away.

Mom drew from this conversation that I had anger problems and scheduled a time for me to meet with her therapist. I didn't know she had a therapist or the money to afford one, but I agreed to meet with this lady. Our first meeting took place the following week in a musty old office near Dayton, Ohio, where a nondescript middle-aged woman, Mom, and I tried to understand why I was so angry. I recognized that human beings aren't very good at judging themselves: I may have been wrong that I was no angrier (in fact, considerably less so) than most of the people in my life. Maybe Mom was right and I did have some anger problems. I tried to keep an open mind. If nothing else, I thought, this woman might give Mom and me an opportunity to get everything in the open.

But that first session felt like an ambush. Immediately, the woman began asking why I would scream at my mother and storm off, why I didn't recognize that she was my mother and that I had to live with her by law. The therapist chronicled “outbursts” that I'd allegedly had, some going back to a time I couldn't remember—the time I threw a tantrum in a department store as a five-year-old, my fight with another child in
school (the school bully, whom I didn't want to punch but did so at Mamaw's encouragement), the times I'd run from home to my grandparents' house because of Mom's “discipline.” Clearly this woman had developed an impression of me based solely on what Mom had told her. If I didn't have an anger problem before, I did now.

“Do you have any idea what you're talking about?” I asked. At fourteen, I knew at least a little about professional ethics. “Aren't you supposed to ask me what I think about things and not just criticize me?” I launched into an hour-long summary of my life to that point. I didn't tell the whole story, since I knew I had to choose my words carefully: During Mom's domestic violence case a couple of years earlier, Lindsay and I had let slip some unsavory details about Mom's parenting, and because it counted as a new revelation of abuse, the family counselor was required to report it to child services. So I didn't miss the irony of lying to a therapist (to protect Mom) lest I ignite another intervention by the county children's services. I explained the situation well enough: After an hour, she said simply, “Perhaps we should meet alone.”

I saw this woman as an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle placed by Mom—not as someone who might help. I explained only half of my feelings: that I had no interest in putting a forty-five-minute barrier between me and everyone I had ever depended on so I could replant myself with a man I knew would be sent packing. The therapist obviously understood. What I didn't tell her is that for the first time in my life, I felt trapped. There was no Papaw, and Mamaw—a longtime smoker with the emphysema to prove it—seemed too frail and exhausted to care for a fourteen-year-old boy. My aunt and uncle had two young kids. Lindsay was newly married and had a child of her own. I had
nowhere to go. I'd seen chaos and fighting, violence, drugs, and a great deal of instability. But I'd never felt like I had no way out. When the therapist asked me what I'd do, I replied that I would probably go live with my dad. She said that this sounded like a good idea. When I walked out of her office, I thanked her for her time and knew that I'd never see her again.

Mom had a massive blind spot in the way that she perceived the world. That she would ask me to move with her to Dayton, that she seemed genuinely surprised by my resistance, and that she would subject me to such a one-sided introduction to a therapist meant that Mom didn't understand something about the way that Lindsay and I ticked. Lindsay once told me, “Mom just doesn't get it.” I initially disagreed with her: “Of course she gets it; it's just the way she is, something she can't change.” After the incident with the therapist, I knew that Lindsay was right.

Mamaw was unhappy when I told her that I planned to live with Dad, and so was everyone else. No one really understood it, and I felt unable to say much about it. I knew that if I told the truth, I'd have a few people offering their spare bedrooms, and all of them would submit to Mamaw's demand that I live permanently with her. I also knew that living with Mamaw came with a lot of guilt, and a lot of questions about why I didn't live with my mom or dad, and a lot of whispers from a lot of people to Mamaw that she just needed to take a break and enjoy her golden years. That feeling of being a burden to Mamaw wasn't something I imagined; it came from a number of small cues, from the things she muttered under her breath, and from the weariness she wore like a dark piece of clothing. I didn't want that, so I chose what seemed like the least bad option.

In some ways, I loved living with Dad. His life was
normal
in precisely the way I'd always wanted mine to be. My stepmom worked part-time but was usually home. Dad came home from work around the same time each day. One of them (usually my stepmom but sometimes Dad) made dinner every night, which we ate as a family. Before each meal, we'd say grace (something I'd always liked but had never done outside of Kentucky). On weeknights, we'd watch some family sitcom together. And Dad and Cheryl never screamed at each other. Once, I heard them raise their voices during an argument about money, but slightly elevated volumes were far different from screaming.

On my first weekend at Dad's house—the first weekend I had ever spent with him when I knew that, come Monday, I wouldn't be going somewhere else—my younger brother invited a friend to sleep over. We fished in Dad's pond, fed horses, and grilled steaks for dinner. That night, we watched
Indiana Jones
movies until the early-morning hours. There was no fighting, no adults hurling insults at one another, no glass china shattering angrily against the wall or floor. It was a boring evening. And it epitomized what attracted me to Dad's home.

What I never lost, though, was the sense of being on guard. When I moved in with my father, I'd known him for two years. I knew that he was a good man, a little quiet, a devout Christian from a very strict religious tradition. When we first reconnected, he made it clear that he didn't care for my taste in classic rock, especially Led Zeppelin. He wasn't mean about it—that wasn't his style—and he didn't tell me I couldn't listen to my favorite bands; he just advised that I listen to Christian rock instead. I could never tell my dad that I played a nerdy collectible card game called Magic, because I feared he'd think the cards were
satanic—after all, kids at the church youth group often spoke of Magic and its evil influence on young Christians. And as most teenagers do, I had so many questions about my faith—whether it was compatible with modern science, for instance, or whether this or that denomination was correct on particular doctrinal disputes.

I doubt he would have gotten upset if I'd asked those questions, but I never did because I didn't know how he'd respond. I didn't know whether he'd tell me I was a spawn of Satan and send me away. I didn't know how much of our new relationship was built on his sense that I was a good kid. I didn't know how he'd react if I listened to those Zeppelin CDs in his house with my younger siblings around. That not knowing gnawed at me to the point where I could no longer take it.

I think Mamaw understood what was going on in my head, even though I never told her explicitly. We spoke on the phone frequently, and one night she told me that I had to know she loved me more than anything and she wanted me to return home when I was ready. “This is your home, J.D., and always will be.” The next day, I called Lindsay and asked her to come and get me. She had a job, a house, a husband, and a baby. But she said, “I'll be there in forty-five minutes.” I apologized to Dad, who was heartbroken by my decision. But he understood: “You can't stay away from that crazy grandma of yours. I know she's good to you.” It was a stunning admission from a man to whom Mamaw never said a nice word. And it was the first indication that Dad understood the complex and conflicting feelings I'd developed. That meant a great deal to me. When Lindsay and her family came to get me, I got in the car, sighed, and said to her, “Thanks for taking me home.” I gave my infant
nephew a kiss on the forehead and said nothing else until we got to Mamaw's.

I spent the rest of the summer mostly with Mamaw. A few weeks with Dad had given me no epiphanies: I still felt caught between a desire to stay with her and a fear that my presence was depriving her of the comforts of old age. So before my freshman year started, I told Mom that I'd live with her so long as I could stay in Middletown's schools and see Mamaw whenever I wanted. She said something about needing to transfer to a Dayton school after my freshman year, but I figured we'd cross that bridge in a year, when we had to.

Living with Mom and Matt was like having a front-row seat to the end of the world. The fighting was relatively normal by my standards (and Mom's), but I'm sure poor Matt kept asking himself how and when he'd hopped the express train to crazy town. It was just the three of us in that house, and it was clear to all that it wouldn't work out. It was only a matter of time. Matt was a nice guy, and as Lindsay and I joked, nice guys never survived their encounters with our family.

Given the state of Mom and Matt's relationship, I was surprised when I came home from school one day early during my sophomore year and Mom announced that she was getting married. Perhaps, I thought, things weren't quite as bad as I expected. “I honestly thought you and Matt were going to break up,” I said. “You fight every day.” “Well,” she replied, “I'm not getting married to him.”

It was a story that even I found incredible. Mom had been working as a nurse at a local dialysis center, a job she'd held for a few months. Her boss, about ten years her senior, asked her out to dinner one night. She obliged, and with her relationship in
shambles, she agreed to marry him a week later. She told me on a Thursday. On Saturday we moved into Ken's house. His home was my fourth in two years.

Ken was born in Korea but raised by an American veteran and his wife. During that first week in his house, I decided to inspect his small greenhouse and stumbled upon a relatively mature marijuana plant. I told Mom, who told Ken, and by the end of the day it had been replaced with a tomato plant. When I confronted Ken, he stammered a bit and finally said, “It's for medicinal purposes, don't worry about it.”

Ken's three children—a young girl and two boys about the same age I was—found the new arrangement as strange as I did. The oldest boy fought constantly with Mom, which—thanks to the Appalachian honor code—meant that he fought constantly with me. Shortly before I went to bed one night, I came downstairs just as he called her a bitch. No self-respecting hillbilly could stand idly by, so I made it abundantly clear that I meant to beat my new stepbrother to within an inch of his life. So unquenchable was my appetite for violence that night that Mom and Ken decided that my new stepbrother and I should be separated. I wasn't even particularly angry. My desire to fight arose more out of a sense of duty. But it was a strong sense of duty, so Mom and I went to Mamaw's for the night.

I remember watching an episode of
The West Wing
about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my
failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

I don't know what happened the day after Mom and I escaped Ken's to Mamaw's for the night. Maybe I had a test that I wasn't able to study for. Maybe I had a homework assignment due that I never had the time to complete. What I do know is that I was a sophomore in high school, and I was miserable. The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget—this, and not my subpar public school, was the real barrier to opportunity.