having driven drunk. My father told the judge the fees weren’t a problem even though they were. A deadline passed and the judge ordered a 30-day sentence. It didn’t feel like he was in jail. I didn’t even know where the jail was. I convinced myself it was not too big a deal. My mother was not eating very much and I figured she was stressed out. One day she asked if I wanted to go with her to the little store, as we called it, which was a convenient mart down the road. The day sweltered and so much light shined through the windows it looked like the glass itself was yellow. I was watching the British version of Who’s Line Is It Anyway? My mother was gathering her purse at the table when she yelped. I thought she said “ow,” so I turned, expecting to see her consoling a thumb pricked by something sharp. Instead she fell straight back almost hitting her head on the corner of the wall. I ran to her to see she was convulsing. I had never called 911 before but this seemed like the perfect time. The operator took the details and I tried to sound distraught because I figured that’s how they wanted me to sound. As though this would make them take me seriously. An ambulance pulled into the lot and they helped her up. One of the paramedics went through her purse finding a small mirror and asked, what’s this for buddy? It’s just a mirror. No drugs, I said. He dropped it back in and lost interest. They took her to the hospital and I stayed home. That night Bizarro Susan came over having heard the news. She was kind enough to bring over some lasagna. When she left I ate some but it was disgusting. I threw it out and made a box of macaroni and cheese. Eventually my other grandparents, different ones who lived in Florida, found out and picked me up so I could stay with them until my mother was out of the hospital. They asked why I didn’t call them the night it happened. I said I didn’t know, but really I didn’t call because it was my home. It wasn’t their white house with its white walls that we weren’t supposed to touch. It wasn’t some bizarro house with a bizarro family that ate bad food. It wasn’t a hotel and it wasn’t strange. It was home and I figured that’s where I would miss my family the best, the place they would return. RODNEY WAS a big man who lived with his wife Mona. Rodney could throw knuckleballs and screwballs and had a loud jolly laugh. He busted in the back door once and told my mother that she didn’t see him. He peaked out the window for a while and then ran out. My mom pulled my youngest brother close and locked the door. MY PARENTS were very good at misunderstanding each 58 BCM 34
other and falling into the trap of yelling for hours. Sometimes I sat on the swings out back in the big grass field while they argued, hoping a girl would come sit next to me. JOHNNY FIX-IT, the Hud Pud’s handy man, stole my big plastic D.A.R.E. mug that I had been awarded during my mandatory enrollment in D.A.R.E. in fifth grade. One time, my parents went over to Johnny’s house because he was from New York and they knew all the same places up north. My mother said they had a nice enough time but Johnny and his wife did a lot of cocaine. THERE WERE a lot of phone calls my parents took for a couple weeks. A supposed job for my father. A place to live. We crowded our little Escort full of stuff about a hundred times to get it all over to the single-wide at the other end of town. I wanted to be a man so I carried out my brother’s television and got it in the hatchback myself. Realizing nothing else would fit I slammed the door down. The glass hit a corner of the television and exploded. I stared at the glass shards on the ground at my feet, the sound of shattering ringing in my ears. I almost laughed, not because I was happy but because it was like some perfect punctuation for our time in the Hud Pud. My mom came out and looked at the glass and then at me and I must have had some long face because she patted me on the back and said it was all right even though it wasn’t because they didn’t have the money to fix it. The new place was smaller and felt like it was made of cardboard but my brothers and I didn’t mind. We knew what it meant. What the Hud Pud had meant. For me it was a point of no return. Maybe because it was all happening as I was hitting puberty, or maybe because time can feel like it goes back and forth, getting jumbled up with love and fear and memory. I came out of the Hud Pud with a knowledge of feeling. A way to detect the ax falling. Also to know what to do when it falls because it’s going to fall. I learned what scientists mean when they say the universe is moving away from itself at all times. I imagine that if you could survive going through a singularity, you’d be changed too much to be you anymore. I never wish we didn’t move to the Hud Pud because my whole path to college, to California, to grad school in Massachusetts, to Buffalo, to these very words I write to you, feels like a straight line. On a straight line there’s no other way to get from beginning to end. There’s a creation point and the way it went. This is what brought me here. This is how I will continue to arrive.