The Big Bang and the Lost Boy
Mar. 8th, 2009 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThere was an unfamiliar skateboard in the RV when B went to open it yesterday morning. So I awakened Robin at the ungodly hour of 11am, set up the water board, plugged the single light bulb into the fraying electrical cord and began to interrogate him. (Eleven is ungodly to Robin – the boy likes his hypnagogic dreams.)
Robin didn’t know whose skateboard it was. He’d never seen it before in his life. No wait – it was Arturo’s. Scratch that – it was Julio’s –
“How did it get into the RV?”
Robin mumbled something. I think it was about the intercession of the holy Virgin Mary or maybe Maximon, the last of the Mayan gods (and don’t forget there’s only 45 more months till the end of the world.)
Of course we both knew whose skateboard it was.
Yesterday was a bad day anyway you sliced it. I am sinking deeper and deeper into a hideous black funk from which it’s almost impossible to rouse myself even though I have enormous amounts of shit to do. B picked up a cardboard box filled with twenty or so black lacquer plate easels on which I’d displayed books for sale at the late Little Store, asked, “Why did you save these?”
“I didn’t want to throw them away. They cost money.”
“What? Like six bucks apiece?”
And I didn’t want to tell him that I still dreamed of a house all my own where one day I might be able to display things on black lacquer plate easels.
We had a huge fight at the storage place. Things are haphazardly crammed into the space, making access and identification impossible and of course this is my fault because I was supposed to organize it before we closed up the store and I didn’t. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to fit any of the things I want to save from the house into it. My blue ash table: first piece of furniture I ever bought, from the furniture store that used to be on the corner of College & Ashley in Berkeley. My antique oak desk and chest of drawers. My mother’s antique love seat. The oak drawer I bought for Robin.
But my best piece of furniture by far is the antique hutch I’d been using down at the store. Its doors have stained glass windows; it has a white enamel shelf under a roll top. I have no idea how old it is but every once in while someone would come into the store, exclaim, “My God – my grandmother had one exactly like this! They’re worth a fortune, you know.”
I didn’t know actually, and had long since given up taking anything people who wandered into the store told me seriously. One time a woman who identified herself as a serious collector of Lucille Ball memorabilia almost fainted when she saw my Lucy doll. “This has got to be worth $10,000!” she said. Wow! I thought. Maybe Robin will get to go to college after all!
When I got home I looked the Lucy doll up on Ebay. One that looked just like it going without bidders for the low, low, low price of $19.99. Sorry, Robin. Looks like it’s gonna be a lifetime sentence at McDonald’s after all.
After that, I gave up relying on people who came into my store as appraisers.
Still, I liked the hutch a lot so when B, scowling, started trying to pick up the top half – solid oak, it weighs a lot – I was sure he was going to drop it. “Please, don’t!” I said. “Put it down!”
“It’ll fit better next to that back wall, be out of the way of everything else –“
“You’ll drop it!”
“I will not drop it. I’ve moved it myself before –“
“Just don’t!”
He glared at me. “Why do we always have to do everything your way? Your way doesn’t always work out so well, does it?”
I stared at him for a second, then jumped to my feet, began gathering up my purse and the canvas tote I’d brought there with me –
“Oh, come on,” he said. “That’s just stupid. Look. We’re both under a hideous amount of stress so we really have to go out of our way to try and be civil to each other –“
He was right. It was stupid to walk home. I didn’t know about the “civil” part though.
For the rest of the day I did my errands in silence. I suppose he thought I was grandstanding. I wasn’t. I felt quite dead inside.
In the middle of the night I woke up with my heart beating fast, in despair because there isn’t any convenient “off” button you can press to make it all go away. The History Channel was airing a show on the Big Bang. I watched it, pondering my own insignificance in an expanding universe filled with galaxies and spiral nebulae and Doppler shifts and Coulomb Force and renegade priests who interpreted the Old Testament – And the earth was without form, and void – as the refractory period before the primordial atom exploded. It was comforting, actually. Clearly the only question important enough to spend time on is, how does human consciousness fit into this? Forget about, how much will those bankruptcy forms cost me? and Do I sign that promissory note knowing I’m about to declare bankruptcy or do I let those assholes at the Cannery Row company fume till my paperwork is filed?
I must have fallen back to sleep. Next thing I knew it was light out and Ben was bending over me looking pissed off. “Wells is here.”
“Huh?”
“He showed up at 1:30 in the morning. I heard him trying to get into the van. I’d locked it. So then I heard him coming up the side of the house to Robin’s door. Robin was asleep.”
“I thought you didn’t want him staying here past that two weeks,” I said carefully.
“I didn’t. I don’t. But what was I supposed to do, let him sleep on the street? It’s freezing out there.”
I sighed and began pulling on my clothes. There’s a building next to Trader Joe’s where the local AA schedules all its meetings. It’s some kind of community service office – Robin calls it “Safe Place,” they give out food to runaways which Robin is proud of scamming. Wells sleeps there sometimes, Robin tells me -- "even though like they’re not supposed to let people sleep there.”
Maybe I should go and talk to them about Wells. But what could they do?
Maybe I should take Wells out to breakfast and talk to him myself.
I resolve upon the latter course, wait around until 11 and wake Wells up.
We walk down to the Old Monterey Café together. When Wells had been diagnosed with pneumonia a couple of weeks ago, his mother evidently got it together enough to provide him with a couch to crash on while he tried to get well. But clearly he wasn’t well yet, he was coughing a lot, a resonant wet sounding cough.
“So, Wells, I wanted to talk to you because frankly I’m worried about you.”
“Well, yeah,” said Wells. “I can see why you would be.”
“I mean you can’t go on like this. It’s not right.”
“I don’t see what the alternative is,” said Wells. “It’s not like I have a whole lot of options.” He’s surprisingly well spoken. “And anyway, it’s not that bad.”
“It is that bad.”
So Wells began to tell me the story of his life. He was born in Pacific Grove, lived there until he was nine or so when his parents got divorced. Then his father took him and moved back to Lodi where the cost of living is a whole lot cheaper. His father was living with his parents, Wells’ grandparents, and apparently never worked an official job that paid into social security, preferring to get by with the underground economy, petty hustling, drug dealing and the like. But he was took good care of his parents who grew increasingly addled and infirm, and was very strict with Wells, an example of Do what I say, not what I do. So at least the father had that going for him.
Then the father was diagnosed with colon cancer. And the mother, Michelle, moved back – whether motivated by love or the prospect of grave looting, I couldn’t really say.
“I was completely normal in Lodi,” Wells told me. He’d ordered blueberry pancakes. The Old Monterey Restaurant really knows how to make blueberry pancakes, nor do they skimp on the plate which must have had 3000 calories piled on top of it. I drank fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and nibbled on a badly toasted bagel.
“I mean, I was doing very well in school, played sports –“
“Which sports?”
“Baseball, basketball. I’m really good at baseball.”
Then his father died and his father’s sister threw Wells and Michelle out of the grandparents’ house. Sold the grandparents’ house. This was the only time I saw Wells get angry during the entire time. “Sold it for a lot less than it was worth and took all the money. Today they a house worth 1.2 million dollars in Half Moon Bay.”
“Where were your grandparents in all of this?”
“Oh, you know. They’re old. They have Alzheimer’s.”
I suspect the sister threw them out because she just couldn’t stand Michelle. For this, I cannot blame her – I can’t stand Michelle and I only talked to her that once for half an hour on the phone. Wells seems to love her but he understands her limitations. “She feels bad because she thinks she’s a horrible mother,” he told me with a little laugh.
“She should feel bad, she is a horrible mother,” I said.
Wells just shrugged.
He steadfastly denies Michelle is drinking or doing drugs but this is something else I don’t believe, and anyway if I did believe it, it would only make the situation worse – theoretically, at least, the situation might improve if, say, she went to rehab. But there’s nothing whatsoever he can do about his mother’s narcissistic borderline personality disorder. I know this from firsthand experience.
After they were kicked out of the father’s parents’ house, Michelle got it into her head that they should move back to the Monterey Bay area –
“I begged her not to,” Wells said. “I mean, she didn’t have any kind of plan, and everything’s so expensive here.”
Also Michelle can’t work. She explained the reason why to me in great detail over the phone, I can’t say I followed very well.
Without any money or any plan, they threw themselves on the kindness of relatives – specifically Michelle’s own mother who lives in the retirement home a couple of blocks away from our house.
“My mom and my grandmother don’t get along very well,” said Wells with another laugh. “And you know, my mom said it would only be for a short time and it ended up being like for a year and a half.”
And then a couple of months ago Michelle got a new boyfriend and decided to move in with him only there wasn’t any room for Wells. They broke up almost immediately, but shortly after that someone at the retirement home noticed that Wells wasn’t over fifty-five and he got kicked out.
Here’s where it gets confusing. Wells says the age thing is not the issue. The issue is that the grandmother doesn’t like him very much. I forbear to ask him, Why? I figured he’d stolen money from her or something.
“But like this next week I’ll probably stay there every night, go to school every day –“
I peer at him. “Wells, there are two reasons why you can’t go on living the way you’re living. First reason is that sooner or later you’re going to get picked up by the cops, and you will have a really unpleasant time if you get into the foster care system. Second reason is – what are your grades like?”
“Pretty terrible, I guess,” he mumbles.
“Wells, you’re smart. Now I know Monterey High is shit carved into a school building but that’s all the more reason why you should be able to ace it. Wells, you’ve got to go to college, it’s the only way out for you. If you don’t, then the only options you’ll ever have in life are the options you have now –“
I’m not sure now why I wanted to talk to him. Assuage my liberal guilt, I suppose, because I’m certainly not in any position to do anything for him.
“I just worry about you,” I kept saying.
And Wells would laugh and explain, “Really, it’s not as bad as you think. It’s a box I’m in for right now. “There’s nothing I can do about it. In a few months when I’m sixteen I can petition to become an emancipated minor and my aunt has said she’ll give me money for an apartment –“
“Do you have it in writing?”
“I don’t need it in writing. That woman stole my house from me. She’ll pay. Till then… It’s not that bad.”
“It is that bad,” I said.
Wells looked at me, clear-eyed. “It could happen to anyone,” he told me. “It’s the nature of life. You could be the richest man on the planet, and boom! next thing you’re living on the streets. There is no security. Security is a complete illusion. At least I know this is going to be a phase. It’s not as though I’m 30 and homeless.”
A remarkably mature thing for a fifteen year old to say, I thought.
And wished there was something I could do for the boy beyond feeding him breakfast.
But there isn’t.
Robin didn’t know whose skateboard it was. He’d never seen it before in his life. No wait – it was Arturo’s. Scratch that – it was Julio’s –
“How did it get into the RV?”
Robin mumbled something. I think it was about the intercession of the holy Virgin Mary or maybe Maximon, the last of the Mayan gods (and don’t forget there’s only 45 more months till the end of the world.)
Of course we both knew whose skateboard it was.
Yesterday was a bad day anyway you sliced it. I am sinking deeper and deeper into a hideous black funk from which it’s almost impossible to rouse myself even though I have enormous amounts of shit to do. B picked up a cardboard box filled with twenty or so black lacquer plate easels on which I’d displayed books for sale at the late Little Store, asked, “Why did you save these?”
“I didn’t want to throw them away. They cost money.”
“What? Like six bucks apiece?”
And I didn’t want to tell him that I still dreamed of a house all my own where one day I might be able to display things on black lacquer plate easels.
We had a huge fight at the storage place. Things are haphazardly crammed into the space, making access and identification impossible and of course this is my fault because I was supposed to organize it before we closed up the store and I didn’t. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to fit any of the things I want to save from the house into it. My blue ash table: first piece of furniture I ever bought, from the furniture store that used to be on the corner of College & Ashley in Berkeley. My antique oak desk and chest of drawers. My mother’s antique love seat. The oak drawer I bought for Robin.
But my best piece of furniture by far is the antique hutch I’d been using down at the store. Its doors have stained glass windows; it has a white enamel shelf under a roll top. I have no idea how old it is but every once in while someone would come into the store, exclaim, “My God – my grandmother had one exactly like this! They’re worth a fortune, you know.”
I didn’t know actually, and had long since given up taking anything people who wandered into the store told me seriously. One time a woman who identified herself as a serious collector of Lucille Ball memorabilia almost fainted when she saw my Lucy doll. “This has got to be worth $10,000!” she said. Wow! I thought. Maybe Robin will get to go to college after all!
When I got home I looked the Lucy doll up on Ebay. One that looked just like it going without bidders for the low, low, low price of $19.99. Sorry, Robin. Looks like it’s gonna be a lifetime sentence at McDonald’s after all.
After that, I gave up relying on people who came into my store as appraisers.
Still, I liked the hutch a lot so when B, scowling, started trying to pick up the top half – solid oak, it weighs a lot – I was sure he was going to drop it. “Please, don’t!” I said. “Put it down!”
“It’ll fit better next to that back wall, be out of the way of everything else –“
“You’ll drop it!”
“I will not drop it. I’ve moved it myself before –“
“Just don’t!”
He glared at me. “Why do we always have to do everything your way? Your way doesn’t always work out so well, does it?”
I stared at him for a second, then jumped to my feet, began gathering up my purse and the canvas tote I’d brought there with me –
“Oh, come on,” he said. “That’s just stupid. Look. We’re both under a hideous amount of stress so we really have to go out of our way to try and be civil to each other –“
He was right. It was stupid to walk home. I didn’t know about the “civil” part though.
For the rest of the day I did my errands in silence. I suppose he thought I was grandstanding. I wasn’t. I felt quite dead inside.
In the middle of the night I woke up with my heart beating fast, in despair because there isn’t any convenient “off” button you can press to make it all go away. The History Channel was airing a show on the Big Bang. I watched it, pondering my own insignificance in an expanding universe filled with galaxies and spiral nebulae and Doppler shifts and Coulomb Force and renegade priests who interpreted the Old Testament – And the earth was without form, and void – as the refractory period before the primordial atom exploded. It was comforting, actually. Clearly the only question important enough to spend time on is, how does human consciousness fit into this? Forget about, how much will those bankruptcy forms cost me? and Do I sign that promissory note knowing I’m about to declare bankruptcy or do I let those assholes at the Cannery Row company fume till my paperwork is filed?
I must have fallen back to sleep. Next thing I knew it was light out and Ben was bending over me looking pissed off. “Wells is here.”
“Huh?”
“He showed up at 1:30 in the morning. I heard him trying to get into the van. I’d locked it. So then I heard him coming up the side of the house to Robin’s door. Robin was asleep.”
“I thought you didn’t want him staying here past that two weeks,” I said carefully.
“I didn’t. I don’t. But what was I supposed to do, let him sleep on the street? It’s freezing out there.”
I sighed and began pulling on my clothes. There’s a building next to Trader Joe’s where the local AA schedules all its meetings. It’s some kind of community service office – Robin calls it “Safe Place,” they give out food to runaways which Robin is proud of scamming. Wells sleeps there sometimes, Robin tells me -- "even though like they’re not supposed to let people sleep there.”
Maybe I should go and talk to them about Wells. But what could they do?
Maybe I should take Wells out to breakfast and talk to him myself.
I resolve upon the latter course, wait around until 11 and wake Wells up.
We walk down to the Old Monterey Café together. When Wells had been diagnosed with pneumonia a couple of weeks ago, his mother evidently got it together enough to provide him with a couch to crash on while he tried to get well. But clearly he wasn’t well yet, he was coughing a lot, a resonant wet sounding cough.
“So, Wells, I wanted to talk to you because frankly I’m worried about you.”
“Well, yeah,” said Wells. “I can see why you would be.”
“I mean you can’t go on like this. It’s not right.”
“I don’t see what the alternative is,” said Wells. “It’s not like I have a whole lot of options.” He’s surprisingly well spoken. “And anyway, it’s not that bad.”
“It is that bad.”
So Wells began to tell me the story of his life. He was born in Pacific Grove, lived there until he was nine or so when his parents got divorced. Then his father took him and moved back to Lodi where the cost of living is a whole lot cheaper. His father was living with his parents, Wells’ grandparents, and apparently never worked an official job that paid into social security, preferring to get by with the underground economy, petty hustling, drug dealing and the like. But he was took good care of his parents who grew increasingly addled and infirm, and was very strict with Wells, an example of Do what I say, not what I do. So at least the father had that going for him.
Then the father was diagnosed with colon cancer. And the mother, Michelle, moved back – whether motivated by love or the prospect of grave looting, I couldn’t really say.
“I was completely normal in Lodi,” Wells told me. He’d ordered blueberry pancakes. The Old Monterey Restaurant really knows how to make blueberry pancakes, nor do they skimp on the plate which must have had 3000 calories piled on top of it. I drank fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and nibbled on a badly toasted bagel.
“I mean, I was doing very well in school, played sports –“
“Which sports?”
“Baseball, basketball. I’m really good at baseball.”
Then his father died and his father’s sister threw Wells and Michelle out of the grandparents’ house. Sold the grandparents’ house. This was the only time I saw Wells get angry during the entire time. “Sold it for a lot less than it was worth and took all the money. Today they a house worth 1.2 million dollars in Half Moon Bay.”
“Where were your grandparents in all of this?”
“Oh, you know. They’re old. They have Alzheimer’s.”
I suspect the sister threw them out because she just couldn’t stand Michelle. For this, I cannot blame her – I can’t stand Michelle and I only talked to her that once for half an hour on the phone. Wells seems to love her but he understands her limitations. “She feels bad because she thinks she’s a horrible mother,” he told me with a little laugh.
“She should feel bad, she is a horrible mother,” I said.
Wells just shrugged.
He steadfastly denies Michelle is drinking or doing drugs but this is something else I don’t believe, and anyway if I did believe it, it would only make the situation worse – theoretically, at least, the situation might improve if, say, she went to rehab. But there’s nothing whatsoever he can do about his mother’s narcissistic borderline personality disorder. I know this from firsthand experience.
After they were kicked out of the father’s parents’ house, Michelle got it into her head that they should move back to the Monterey Bay area –
“I begged her not to,” Wells said. “I mean, she didn’t have any kind of plan, and everything’s so expensive here.”
Also Michelle can’t work. She explained the reason why to me in great detail over the phone, I can’t say I followed very well.
Without any money or any plan, they threw themselves on the kindness of relatives – specifically Michelle’s own mother who lives in the retirement home a couple of blocks away from our house.
“My mom and my grandmother don’t get along very well,” said Wells with another laugh. “And you know, my mom said it would only be for a short time and it ended up being like for a year and a half.”
And then a couple of months ago Michelle got a new boyfriend and decided to move in with him only there wasn’t any room for Wells. They broke up almost immediately, but shortly after that someone at the retirement home noticed that Wells wasn’t over fifty-five and he got kicked out.
Here’s where it gets confusing. Wells says the age thing is not the issue. The issue is that the grandmother doesn’t like him very much. I forbear to ask him, Why? I figured he’d stolen money from her or something.
“But like this next week I’ll probably stay there every night, go to school every day –“
I peer at him. “Wells, there are two reasons why you can’t go on living the way you’re living. First reason is that sooner or later you’re going to get picked up by the cops, and you will have a really unpleasant time if you get into the foster care system. Second reason is – what are your grades like?”
“Pretty terrible, I guess,” he mumbles.
“Wells, you’re smart. Now I know Monterey High is shit carved into a school building but that’s all the more reason why you should be able to ace it. Wells, you’ve got to go to college, it’s the only way out for you. If you don’t, then the only options you’ll ever have in life are the options you have now –“
I’m not sure now why I wanted to talk to him. Assuage my liberal guilt, I suppose, because I’m certainly not in any position to do anything for him.
“I just worry about you,” I kept saying.
And Wells would laugh and explain, “Really, it’s not as bad as you think. It’s a box I’m in for right now. “There’s nothing I can do about it. In a few months when I’m sixteen I can petition to become an emancipated minor and my aunt has said she’ll give me money for an apartment –“
“Do you have it in writing?”
“I don’t need it in writing. That woman stole my house from me. She’ll pay. Till then… It’s not that bad.”
“It is that bad,” I said.
Wells looked at me, clear-eyed. “It could happen to anyone,” he told me. “It’s the nature of life. You could be the richest man on the planet, and boom! next thing you’re living on the streets. There is no security. Security is a complete illusion. At least I know this is going to be a phase. It’s not as though I’m 30 and homeless.”
A remarkably mature thing for a fifteen year old to say, I thought.
And wished there was something I could do for the boy beyond feeding him breakfast.
But there isn’t.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 02:17 am (UTC)I hope you can keep a positive outlook. I know it really sucks, but it is essential to keep a positive outlook. Throughout this last year, I've been down the river Styx, and have made it back, mostly intact. I did the best to keep a positive outlook on the future. When Denise died you made many sagacious observations, and served up excellent advice. My positive outlook advice isn't "Tony Robbins," it's from my own heart and your own woeds.
Drop me a PM if you want to talk on the phone.
Jeff
no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 02:42 pm (UTC)Generally I'm an upbeat person. It's really unusual for me to feel as horrible as I do right now, so dead inside. I suppose it will get better -- experience argues it must. But right now I just -- well. Suspect you understand the landscape I'm visiting.
Some time when we're both feeling upbeat it would be fun to talk on the phone.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 02:46 pm (UTC)If she wanted unconditional love, she should have just bought a puppy.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-09 03:10 pm (UTC)