I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (5 page)

I’ve been single for a few months, since I broke up with Bryan, a musician who came over one evening “just to jam” and basically never left. He and I started a band together, and while our music was actually pretty amazing, we found out why people say to never date your bandmate. You’ll want to kill them, that’s why.

The relationship ended when I discovered we’d been having a little misunderstanding for the past three years: I thought we were more or less engaged, and he thought we were just filling time until the real thing comes along.

Whoopsy-fuck!

“You should date online,” Lisa says, sensing that enough time has passed since the Bryan debacle.

“No, I shouldn’t,” I say. “Look at me. You think there’s any guy
I’m
going to be interested in online?” Sometimes I think I’m so different from everyone else just because of my unusual childhood and my alternative hair.

“Yeah, I do,” she snaps back. “Here.” She turns the computer toward me. “Have a look. You can use my login.”

Filling the screen of her computer is the home page of a popular dating website—the one that’s like meeting someone at the office. I guess it’s better than the site that’s more like meeting someone in a bar, but not as good as the one that’s more like meeting someone at Starbucks. There’s nothing else to do at the moment, however, so I think to myself,
Fine, I’ll check it out
.

I start clicking around, paging through men. Dozens and dozens of them. Click. Click. Click. Not
one
of them is interesting to me. There are UNGs galore—chubby, balding, a little past their prime. There are even some “cute” guys, but they’re not really my type. Too long on working out and too short on working in. There’s nothing. Nada. Zip. Until…

Wait. Who’s
that
?

(Don’t click it. You’ll never be the same.)

The picture stops me in my tracks. There’s something so wide-eyed, so woodland-creature about him. He’s like a magical elf king, with satyr rising. Equal parts indie-rocker Beck and Brit-rocker Liam Gallagher. Which is to say, he’s a guy a normal American girl probably would have paged right by with little more than a note to self saying
25 percent gay, 35 percent freak.
She most certainly would
not
have said
45 percent big dick.

Me, though, I’m not normal.

No. I am having a moment of Total Recognition. I am connected to this photograph! I
know
this person! Even though I’ve never met
him! If the gods of love could whisper in my ear, this is what they would be saying:

You have just laid eyes on a man who is going to trigger every single childhood wound you have, who is going to bring those wounds to the surface, and who will, in the process, bring you to your knees, all for the purpose of your healing.

Like I said, love at first sight.

Quickly, I scan his profile—as if what I read will even matter. It is exceptionally well written. In it, he talks about living downtown in a loft, and all I can think is
I wonder how I’m going to like living downtown.

Even as I’m thinking these thoughts, I’m aware that they are quote-unquote insane.
I’ve never even
met
this guy!
But obviously I’m not crazy. Crazy people don’t know when they’re thinking crazy thoughts. I
know
this is crazy. Totally different.

I call out to Lisa, who is busy writing something profound, like “(PAUL)
Good evening, I’m Paul Magers
. (LAURA)
And I’m Laura Diaz. Our top story tonight…”

“Now
here’s
the kind of guy I like,” I say.

“Show me,” she says. “What kind of guy do you like?”

I swivel the computer screen in her direction. “This kind.” She looks at the picture of Paul. She wrinkles her nose.

“He looks like Beck,” she says.

“I know. Isn’t he awesome?”

“Whatever gets you off,” she says. “Just invite me to the wedding.”

I click the page closed and go back to my stupid newswriting. But for the next half hour, I can’t seem to stop myself from thinking about how much I’m going to like living downtown…

I ONLY REMEMBER A COUPLE OF THEM.
Of the dozen or so foster homes June says I bounced through before landing in their lovely four-bedroom contemporary (the nicest house on the block), memories of all but a few have faded.

Actually, “remember” is not quite the right word.

What I have are impressions. Some of them are visual—pictures of scenes, of rooms, of people’s faces where the centers are blurry like if you had glaucoma. Others are aural, like the house near the train tracks where the man came into my room at night, or olfactory, like the place that smells of Charlie perfume and unchanged diapers. Whichever sense the images are connected to, they are not so much clear as they are indelible and unchanging over time. That’s how I know they’re real.

I have memories going back to age three, which isn’t really amazing when you consider how much was going on. My personal theory is that when people don’t remember their childhoods, it’s because not much was happening that a kid would consider newsworthy. When things are crack-a-lackin’—Mom’s a-leavin’, and Dad’s a-gettin’ jailed—you remember plenty.

The first place I remember is my grandma McMillan’s in Gary, Indiana. But it’s not her house I remember so much as the restaurant where she worked. Thelma was a short-order cook at a coffee shop around the corner. While she fried eggs and bacon and sausages and hash browns and served them to the neighborhood people, my cousins Russell and Ray and I used to jump on a pile of old mattresses in a back room. A scene that sounds (and was) superghetto but that I remember as being superfun.

I stayed at Thelma’s only a couple of months. The story of exactly how I came to leave there would make a great first episode in a TV series I should pitch about a detective who traces the lives of kids from broken families back to the source of their original dysfunction. In the show, a couple of smart detectives (one of them me) would run around putting together all the pieces of how someone’s life (okay, mine) got so fucked-up.

My real-life investigation starts with a phone call to Phyllis, the longtime girlfriend of one of my dad’s posse members, who still lives in South Minneapolis. I get her number from Cadillac, who is still
my dad’s best friend on the outside. Cadillac lives in Los Angeles, and though I don’t see him often, we speak regularly on the phone. He became an actor in his fifties and now has a cool career playing character parts in movies and television. He’s the only posse member who never did time. He’s like a godfather to me.

“You call her,” he says of Phyllis. “She knew your mom. And she likes to talk.”

He’s so right. As part of the inner circle, Phyllis was good friends with Linda, which means she had a front-row—or should I say ringside—seat to my early-life drama. When she picks up the phone, it’s like we’ve known each other forever.

“Girl, I knowed you since before you was born.” Phyllis’s got a tenor sax for a voice—bright and reedy and impossible to ignore. “I sure did. I knew your mama and your dad’s girlfriend Yvonne, too. I loved Linda.
Mmm-hmm
.”

Phyllis says “mmm-hmmm” the way teenage girls say the word “like.” Like, constantly.

Mmmm-hmmm.

There’s a thing in writing TV cop shows—it’s the first thing you learn—where the detectives go looking for A, but they always find B. It’s how you keep the story surprising. It’s also what happens, apparently, in real life.

Before talking to Phyllis, I thought I knew all about My Life, the Early Years. I’ve had countless conversations with Cadillac—about pimping, hustling, my dad, my mom, and Minneapolis in the 1960s. But talking to Phyllis is different—she’s a chick, so she has all the chick-type information. Like what folks were wearing.

“Linda was
sharp,
girl,” Phyllis enthuses. “Mmm-hmm. She was
sharp
. She had herself a mink coat. You know they had the coats made out of the females and the coats made out of the males? She had the
really
expensive one.” Actually, I didn’t know this. Learn something new every day. “I used to call her Miss Jackie Kennedy, ’cause she look just like Jackie.”

Well, maybe not quite
just
like Jackie. I’ve seen pictures from this era, and indeed, Linda had a bouffant (on a good day—on a bad day a bouffant is just a rat’s nest), and a couple of cute Oleg Cassini knockoffs. With her big orangey-hazel-brown eyes and wide smile, Linda definitely had her something. And charisma to match my dad’s. But she was a good couple hundred miles, at least, away from Miss Porter’s.

After some more reminiscing about female minks and sixties hairdos, Phyllis gives me the twist. “You know Linda’s mother ruined her life, girl,” she says casually.
“Mmmm-hmmm.”

No, I didn’t know this.

“She shore did.”

“Do you mean Helen?” I prod.

“
Yeah,
I mean Helen. Linda’s mother. That woman, she took it to the
limit
. The
limit,
girl.”

“The limit?” (I make a mental note to resurrect the use of the phrase “the limit” by overusing it until it catches on. Kind of like “right on” circa 1997.) “What did she do?”

“
Mmmm-hmmm.
She got all dressed up and visit Freddie in the prison and tell him she gon’ take you home with her. And she went down to Gary and got you from your grandmama—”

Oh, yeah. Now I remember. One of my indelible images is a plane ride I took home from Gary. I remember the plane. I just never knew who was sitting next to me.

“And when she got you back to Minneapolis, girl…” Phyllis pauses. I can feel her shaking her head on the other end of the line, and all at once, I know this is the moment—the big reveal—where the final fact drops and the villain is unmasked.

“She put you in a foster home.” Phyllis’s voice is clogged with disgust. “And didn’t nobody know where you was.
Mmmm-hmmm.
” She lets it sink in, good and long. “She took it to the limit.”

So
this
is why my dad’s family didn’t take me?
I always thought it was because my dad didn’t want me to be raised in Gary—that it
was too poor and too dangerous for his taste, a conclusion I came to knowing that my aunt Florence and cousin Rochelle were murdered the year after I left.

But if Phyllis was right, and she sounded mighty right, it was my own grandmother who gave me away. Not only did she
not
want me, she didn’t want anyone else to have me, either.

Why?
Or, more accurately,
why not?

Phyllis must be able to read my thoughts, because she’s already explaining it to me. “See, you was the bond between your mom and dad. Your grandmama didn’t want them to have nothin’ to do with each other. Some womens would do
anything
not to have they daughter mixed up with no black man. Prostitutin’ and stuff.

“Helen hated your dad. She thought if she got ridda you, they wouldn’t have no reason to be together.
Mmm-hmmm.
But didn’t matter where they put you, your daddy always tracked you down. I never
seen
a man so crazy about his child.” I’m still trying to process all this, but Phyllis’s on a roll.

“Linda had no life when her mother got done with her. She don’t dress no more. Her feet was dirty under the bottom. You know what I’m sayin’?” Her voice rises at the end of the sentence for punctuation.

Yeah. Not really. But, yeah, I guess so.

“She didn’t care about her life no more. Her mother tore her life
up
.”

I’m stunned. For a minute I slip into that defended state where it seems like it all happened to someone else. Growing up, I lived in that space all the time. Completely detached from everything. I would tell my life story as if I were talking about a character on
All My Children
. But over the years, I have reconnected the wires—many of them, anyhow—and now have an ability to experience my life from the inside outward.

Still, I cannot fathom how my own mother’s mother could dispose of her own flesh and blood. Cute flesh and blood! I can see how much more comforting it has been to imagine my crazy
mother being unable to take care of me than my super-rational grandmother making a calculated decision to just…give me away. It’s the difference between manslaughter and premeditated murder. One’s fundamentally human. The other is fundamentally not.

I also can’t help but wonder exactly
how
Helen carried out her plan. Did she simply get out the phone book, jot down an address, drive there, put some money in a meter outside a sterile-looking building downtown, and walk in with a three-year-old girl, then walk out without one? Or did she bring me home from the airport and, after deliberating for a while, call social services, then wait an hour and forty minutes for some idealistic codependent (who didn’t know what to major in at the University of Minnesota and picked social work out of a hat) to knock on the front door, talk briefly with her, then take me by the hand, put me in the backseat of a car, and drive off with me?

Did I know what was happening? Did she give me a kiss? Did I wave good-bye as the car pulled away from the curb?

Something tells me I didn’t even cry.

I MEET HELEN ONCE AFTER THAT,
at the age of thirty. It’s one of the few occasions where I see my mom, on a trip back to Minneapolis. Helen comes over to be part of the visit and brings a box of old pictures with her.

I’ve never seen myself as a baby before.

There are a dozen or more photos of me with my dad—him always holding me, me always adorably dressed—and five or six of me with Helen. She was attractive then, with remarkably long, pretty arms. Besides her tight smile, she seems to like me okay. There are only two photos of me with Linda, both at Christmas. I’m about four, so it must have been my last Christmas with her. As far as I know I was already in foster care, but maybe they let me see her, just
for the holiday. In one picture, I’m on the floor, opening presents. In the other, I’m sitting on her lap, my smile especially big and bright. As I study the photograph, I notice that this feeling of sitting on her lap is like an heirloom I accidentally put out at a yard sale for a dollar. It’s long gone. And I’m a little sick about it.