The beginning, Waking up.
Icy sunlight streamed through the dirt-smeared windows of the nursery. I was cold and hungry. It was Christmas morning. I crawled off the pallet, dragging a tangle of shredded blankets with me. My bed was a pallet consisting of a thin mattress in the corner on the green and white tile floor. I had not wet the bed. My father found the mattress in a trash pile, and he was proud of it because he loved getting something for nothing.
The mattress was decorated with faded stripes whose original color might have been dark blue. It was stained and lumpy. Most of the stains were urine, but not all of them were mine. It was heaped with a rat's nest of thin blankets, sheets and battered toy animals, including a bear and a wolf. Harley Cat was still asleep on the pillow. A huge fishing net hung above the bed. It was made of brown cord with bulbous glass floats and plastic starfish woven into the mesh. Dusty cardboard boxes and paper grocery sacks were stacked high along the walls. Toys, most of them broken, were scattered across the floor. The SafeWay bag where my clothes were stored was on the floor at the foot of the pallet. I dressed.
During the last few weeks, I had accumulated cowboy toys, getting one after another each time my grandma took me to the hospital. I already had the boots, but now thanks to her, I had a hat, a Western style shirt, and a handkerchief. Finally, last night, I found a gun and holster in the Salvation Army Donation Box. I felt that I was now a cowboy and wanted to ride a horse. I thought of the horse at the Indian’s ranch. In fact, I had been awake half the night thinking about it. I opened the door.
I was greeted by the psychotic blare of Captain Kangaroo, a morning TV show, topped off by the racket of two radios, each loud and tuned to a different station. The tree loomed in front of me, most of its lights dark because I had eaten a bulb that had been part of the main strand several nights ago. The one working strand blinked monotonously in the dark room. There were several wrapped presents under the tree, but they were for my mother.
The Salvation Army collection box was next to the tree, still on its side from when Donald, my father, knocked it over to cut its lock. The rest of the living room on the other side of the tree and donation box was crammed with junk, indistinct in the gloom. Furniture and boxes were stacked to the ceiling. On the edges, the boxes had collapsed giving way to dusty mounds of trash.
Sometimes my parents left food lying around. I was hungry. To get to the main part of the room, I squeezed between a smoking kerosine heater and the tree. The fresh smell of the cut Douglas fir was strong near the heat source.
As I scrambled toward the island of furniture where the TV lived, my gray-faced mother lifted her gaze from her work and looked straight ahead. Her eyes narrowed slightly and fixed on the TV. I was off to the side, and her head never turned toward me.
She sat in her gold La-Z-Boy reclining chair. She wore a green velvet robe and a pink nightgown underneath the robe. She wore this outfit day and night, never changing out of it except for one time each year. The memory is vivid because she made a big fuss about how much she hated doing the laundry while she ritualistically washed it. Laundry day was in the Spring, and her clothes were thus slick with nearly a year of body grease and spilled food.
With her green robe and her crown of curlers, she was like a queen sitting on a golden throne ruling over piles of treasure. Her chair was a another disaster: like her robe, its gold fabric was slick with body grease and the remains of food. The fabric was torn to shreds because the cats used it as a scratching post.
Her head was facing down again and her hard fingers continued their methodical digging in the fur of an orange tabby named Orange Tabby. An obese woman, her lap had a large enough surface to hold several of the fifteen felines she owned. She (the mother, not the cat) snorted and ticced: she made an unpleasant sound in the back of her mouth. It was like she was trying to clear a mass of goppy mucous that had built up in her nose and throat. Just like the wretched character from the Hobbit, it sounded like she was saying “gollum.”
It was winter. Every day, she picked fleas, and I pooped tapeworms. This was unusual because it was not flea season and cats ought not to have fleas in the winter. Their eggs could not survive the cold, and they died off.
Her hard fingers dug into Orange Tabby’s pelt and parted the fur. She peered myopically into the exposed line of white skin. Her pale fingertips adroitly pinched a fat little body and ripped it out of the fur.
“Gollum,” she said, making an angry face at it as she held it between her strong nails and squeezed. Its body burst with a bloody "pip."
She carefully scraped the ruined carcass from the backs of each blood-smeared nail with the tip of the nail of the opposite finger, gathering it into a smeared pile. She set the remains along with a tuft of fur that had come out with the flea onto a small pile of fleas, bits of dried skin, and scabby clumps of fur on the one clear spot on the edge of her end table.
Next to the pile of fleas was a grimy orange Oregon Beavers cup of Dr. Pepper sitting in a heavy black, mouldy water ring stained into the monkeypod table top.
Her table was piled high with years of debris. My father named this artifact “the Pile.” When she wasn’t picking fleas from the cats, she devoted much of the day adding other treasures to the pile. She saved a lot of her mail. She cut out coupons and had already saved years of coupons, most of them now doubtless expired, from newspapers and the general mail.
She spent hours each day piling on scraps of paper which she noisily ripped from the pages of newspapers, magazines, and store catalogs. She cut out the outlines of fashion models from the Haut Couture sections of the JC Penny, Sears, and the KMart catalog.
She ripped out pages from Victoria’s Secret and others and filled their margins filled with her cryptic notes. She was always writing in the blank spaces on these scraps of paper, but she refused to answer me when I asked her what she was writing. Sometimes when she was not in the room, I looked at it. My grandmother had taught me to read flashcards, so I could read basic printed writing. Hers was cursive scribbling written with a promotional ballpoint pen. Sometimes I wrote on the paper myself, scribbling little loops to form strings of the letter “a” in cursive in the margins.
I wouldn’t learn cursive script for several more years, and even after I could write it, most of her writing was illegible. Most of what I could identify was recipes she had copied from the TV cooking shows. She did not cook, but she watched cooking shows on Public Television everyday. She had hundreds of lists copied from television programs and commercials, names of things that had been advertised on TV, and bits form Phil Donahue or Opra Windfrey.
Some of writings were organized into paragraphs. One scrap puzzled me: “he wore a Tshirt that said ‘you would smile too if you could eat what bugs you.’” That was the slogan from a T-shirt I wore when I was eight years old. It had a graphic of a frog grinning as it ate a pesky fly that got too close to it. She had given it to me for school in the third grade. The day I wore, which might have been the first day of class, some of my classmates made fun of me for it, and I never wore it in public again.
When I tired of imitating her writing, I drew on the paper, giving makeovers to the Victoria’s Secret models, accentuating the makeup around the eyes, enhancing the lipstick with blue ink, and introducing tapeworms like the ones that chronically infected me and each of the cats.
Wth her cut-outs was unopened junk mail, bills, dirty cups and dishes, used paper plates, religious tracts from Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and other Fundamentalist Christian outfits, timeshare brochures, crumpled and dirty Kleenex and napkins, stained paper towels, scraps of moldy food, and wrappers from years of snacking on candy and donuts. In this way, the Pile grew to several feet in height over the years. It was covered with a thick layer of dust, clumps of her own hair, spider webs, and tufts of cat fur. Also on the Pile were brochures and how to books sold by dozens of different mail order schools on developing your psychic powers to win contests.
Like everything else in that room, the pair of radios were sticky with cat pee and covered in spider webs. They were perched beside her reclining chair on the piles of newspapers that surrounded the recliner. She never turned off the radios and each one was always tuned to a different station which she changed, depending on which station had a promotional contest that interested her. They were usually tuned to AM talk radio shows but sometimes at least one played music. It was not just the radios but the TV was always on.
She had complained several times years later about hearing voices when it was quiet and she was alone. She explained that the voices were spirits. Sometimes they were her New Age Spirit Guides like something out of a Shirley McClain novel, but sometimes they were demons. They were usually demons, and therefore she tried to drown them out.
