Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (10 page)

Life with my mom was not mean at all. She was seemingly the opposite of my dad. She did not yell or hit. She was soft-spoken and calm and full of artistic imagination, always making me feel anything was possible. But
all her time was spent reading or doing artwork, and very little was spent with us. I remember her crying a lot. We could hear her through the floorboards.

My favorite times with her were in her studio, where she taught me how to do glasswork. I watched as she drew a design on paper in Sharpie. She could draw freehand very well. I would then help her cut each shape and number them. We laid the paper cutouts on sheets of colored glass she had selected and then drew an outline around one using the glass cutting knife to carefully free the unique form from its generic former self. We’d wrap copper foil around the edges of the glass, and slowly a mosaic would come together as her drawing was reassembled, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. Then the fun work of soldering each piece, the lead melting like mercury when I touched it to the hot tool, and hardening again almost as quickly. I would accompany her on installations, going to rich people’s homes, listening in like a fly on the wall as the owners marveled at their new purchase and my mother waxed on about the philosophical and spiritual undertones of her work. On a few occasions my mom and I got singing jobs this way. She and I worked up an a cappella set, and she would offer to sing at any functions for the same clients. A few took her up on it, and we would dress nicely and walk around parties in backyards, singing songs for partygoers much like magicians walk around performing tricks in similar settings. Soon my mother would be talking with all the guests as if she were one of them. I took everything in, always from the outside.

My mom began to turn me on to music she liked—Odetta, Josephine Baker, Tracy Chapman. I listened, transfixed, as lyrics stirred my soul, and raw voices transmuted hurt and fear into hope. I had gotten hold of her copy of Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes singing “Famous Blue Raincoat.” I listened to the story a dozen times in a row, seeing Leonard’s lyrics come to life like a movie in my mind. I wanted to inspire that kind
of tragic passing of two ships. I wanted to be able to write in a way that imparted the angst, the longing and moody undertones, an entire psyche as much as a scene or feeling. It would be the inspiration for “Foolish Games” five years later:
I watched from my window, always felt I was outside, looking in on you. You stood in my doorway, with nothing to say, besides some comment on the weather.

My brothers and I continued to drift apart, as we had slowly begun to do after the divorce. I think we all became so preoccupied with surviving that it drew us each inward in solitary fashion, slowly causing us to separate rather than grow closer together. When I moved to Hawaii, Shane moved to Wyoming to work for an outdoor guide. By the time we were back together in Anchorage, the drift had become more pronounced. We went to the same school but hung out with separate crowds, and Atz Lee tried his best to fit in, though he always struggled the worst. He switched schools often to escape bullying, and looking back I wish I had taken more time with him and helped him. I was so busy trying to save myself and find friends to fit in with that it took all my focus, it seems. I was still operating under the belief that my little brother was the enemy because he was my dad’s clear favorite. I spent much of my childhood trying to feel better about myself by knocking down Dad’s favorite. Such a sad and misguided energy, one I aimed toward my brother but should have rightfully been focused on my dad.

At the end of the school year I went back to Homer, drifting with my backpack between couches again. Around this time Dad and I began to tour farther across the state, picking up a band here and there if a bar wanted a more up-tempo set. This was my first introduction to playing with bands, though I was just a backup singer. We still did covers mostly, old Hank Williams Sr. stuff, Jim Croce, Clapton, anything that the folks could dance to. I began to sing lead on a few songs, like Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and “The End Is Not in
Sight” by Amazing Rhythm Aces. I sang “The House of the Rising Sun” and learned to get the crowd going by belting it out. People requested to hear me sing for the first time, which was fun. Adjusting to a band was easier musically than it was socially, mainly because a thirty-five-year-old musician kept making moves on me. To save money on hotel rooms, we would pitch a tent on the beach in the wee hours after the gig and lay our sleeping bags out. It became an unspoken game of chess as the musician waited to put his bag down after he saw where mine was. I learned quickly to put myself against the farthest tent wall, and my dad’s bag next to mine.

The bars in the interior of Alaska were different and fun to play. I can’t recall the names of some, but remember that it seemed like they were in the middle of nowhere, strategically located so that folks from the many outlying towns could drive about the same distance to drink and socialize. The chasms between my school life and social life and my night life widened. I blended in with the adults quite easily, and the social aspect of kids my age became increasingly difficult to navigate.

For the next school year I wanted to continue going to Steller Secondary School, but my mom had moved into a new house, where we joined her. Our new home was a black house with white trim that sat all alone across from a cemetery in downtown Anchorage. It was not a good area. The project housing nearby had been demolished and heaps of crumbled lives were left for years in the lot down the road. Ours was the only house left on the block. I thought it was fitting the house was dressed in mourning colors for those who slept eternally across the street from us.

I remember the first bum I saw freeze to death on our sidewalk. The alcohol made him sleepy and the cold soon made him numb and he slipped from this world.
His spirit making the short journey from our side of the street to the next
, I thought to myself. In the dusky twilight an ambulance came and lifted his stiff body into the back. From that time on
we kept a number taped to our fridge that we would call when we saw a drunk asleep on our sidewalk. Good Samaritans would come and load them up, some groggy and spitting, others grateful and compliant, as they were driven to a safe, warm place to sleep for the night.

We may have developed a reputation for being helpful to the homeless, as several started camping on our street and coming by. My brothers and I were home alone in our basement when a belligerent drunk knocked on our front door. Shane went upstairs and peeked around the corner to see the man’s red face, swollen with anger and drink. “I need some aspirin!” he was saying. He looked scary and we decided not to answer. We returned to our video games downstairs, and the drunk followed from outside and rapped on the tiny basement windows. He was on his knees, hunched over, face pressed against the window, hands cupped up to his eyes to reduce the glare. “I can see you in there! Goddamnit! I can see you in there! I need some fucking aspirin!” He began to shatter the window. We picked up the phone and shouted that we were calling the cops and he left. We of course did not call the cops. They would not have come in time anyway.

The window remained unfixed the rest of the winter, the cold air seeping in and making our rooms down there bitterly cold. We kept our doors shut and turned the heat up in our rooms, and avoided the basement as much as possible, although it was where the TV was, which is powerful motivation for three teenagers. So we would grab all the blankets off our beds and wrap ourselves in them and enjoy some mindless distraction in arctic temperatures.

My mother took the master bedroom on the main floor for herself but she never slept in it. There was a separate apartment upstairs with a private entry that would have been perfect for renting out, but instead that was where she stayed. When I heard her get home, I would go up the stairs in the back. I loved to visit with her. She seemed magical and calm
and serene. She talked about art and her dreams. She said some people in life were dreamers, and others were warriors. She said she was a dreamer and told me of her elaborate visions. She was like a medicine woman, full of portent and premonitions. She said I was a warrior, a doer, and capable of handling anything. This made me proud. It reminded me of a time years before, when we were visiting her after the divorce. I was about nine. I finally confided in her that Dad had started hitting Atz Lee and me. I’m not sure how I expected her to react, but it was somewhere in the realm of protecting us. Maybe taking us away from that place. Taking us back. I hoped. Instead she looked at me and said, “Jewel. You have a steel rod in you. You cannot be broken. Atz Lee is more fragile. You need to look out for him.”

Children are incapable of comprehending the whole picture. Incapable of being angry at a parent and saying,
Hey, that isn’t what I need to hear right now. I need you to protect me and want me and love me. I am fragile too. I’m afraid I’m breaking.
Instead I saw my mom as most kids do, especially because I had so much need. She was a deity and I assumed she must be telling me the truth. In a way it was the truth, and I knew that down deep too.
I can take anything
.
I will not break.
It was like being given marching orders to get back in the trenches and
take it, take it, take it.
And at age fourteen I could add
I am a warrior and a doer
to the list. I had no idea the dreamer was grooming me to be her servant; at the time she was pure oxygen for me.

My mom worked with glass mostly, but that winter had begun working with ice. She liked the impermanence of ice, she said, that her art would be experienced for only a moment before it disappeared. She said it made the experience more special. I felt the fleeting moments of our interactions were the same. Special, ephemeral, and intense before she disappeared again.

In our backyard she covered female mannequins with satin sheets and
lay them on the ground. Each day we used a water bottle to spray the sheets down so that a new layer of ice built up each night. After a week she lifted the sheets off the mannequin and the ghostly, silken frozen forms of women were propped up all over our backyard. It was eerie and beautiful.

Large chunks of glacial ice would come off barges and she did installations like launching ice lanterns filled with candles into lakes against the backdrop of the black Alaskan night. Now that I write this, I can’t remember whether she actually did this one or only talked about it. It’s hard to say whether my imagination took over or whether it happened in real life. Much of my experience with my mom was this way. My mind filled in holes and vacancies with vivid and beautiful experiences to keep my heart from breaking with the ugliness of the bitter truth.

One art installation I do remember. She took over a three-room gallery and filled it with ice carvings of women with berries placed inside their bodies. I imagined they looked like frozen molecules of blood in a crystalline flesh. My mother placed rock salt in their hands, which caused them to melt—symbolic of the way women embrace what destroys us so often, I overheard her say. Leftover salt covered the floor except for paths that led from one room to the next, lit with tea candles. A song she recorded a cappella played on a loop, an old folk song with a haunting melody. The ice fragments shimmering like wet crystals in the candlelit darkness. It was stunning and she was brilliant. I could hear those who walked through comment on the symbolism of it all. They were moved.

One day at the graveyard house she came downstairs from her apartment, sat us down, and announced that she had cancer. It didn’t dawn on me to ask what kind. I was so scared for her. She said she needed to go to Hawaii to heal. I think she got money out of my dad to go for treatment. Not much changed with her gone. We got ourselves out the door as usual. When she came back several weeks later, she told amazing tales of
vision-questing and sleeping in caves, where she had dreams of lizards that taught her things about life and the universe. She brought me back feathers and rocks and taught me how to make medicine wheels. She also brought me totem animal cards, and we would stay up for hours as I asked the cards questions about my worries and fears. She would help interpret the cards I turned over, teaching me about myself and what I could do to improve my life. I was always looking for deeper meaning. She was always happy to help. We sat on her bed and I asked the cards about boys and school. She never mentioned the cancer, and when I asked her about it, and where it was, she said dismissively, “Oh, it was something small on my leg. It’s gone now,” and it was dropped.

Money was scarce. Things were disjointed and fractured. Other than these encounters in the evening with my mom, we rarely saw her for breakfast or dinner on a daily basis. My brothers and I fended for ourselves. I often stayed with Dionne and her mom, over in the projects on the other side of town. I took the city bus several connections to school, her house, and back to mine at times. I met lots of interesting characters on the bus lines, and saw a lot of life. Girls giving boys blow jobs in the women’s bathroom at the bus station. Drug baggies quietly exchanged. I remember one pimp who got on the bus, then stopped in alarm and said loudly, “Am I in Hollywood?” He began to walk down the aisle toward me in the back, the petite white girl wearing a miniskirt and leather jacket complete with an ’80s tidal wave of bangs. I knew enough by then not to take the bait and kept looking out the window, sensing a punch line coming. He made it over to me and said, “’Cause, honey, I am seeing
stars
!”

It was the first time I’d heard this line, and it did make me laugh. I would have the opportunity to hear him say the line to others many more times that year, as we always seemed to be on the same bus line.

I took care of myself, and took jobs where they came up. I gigged quite a lot during this time, which is how I bought many of my nicer school
clothes. I was frugal, though, and saved everything I could, keeping my cash in a box in the cupboard. Sometimes my dad and I traveled on weekends to remote towns for shows. Sometimes I would sit in with other bands or players I had met through the years.