Crash and Burn

Chapter One

I was a good child. I know this because my mother and grandmother told me. I also actually remember being exceptionally, well, good. I have a better than average memory of the things early in life. How do I know this? Well . . . I have memories in my car seat in the back of my mom's car in the days before you were required to be in a car seat (until you were in eleventh grade). I remember not being able to talk. I remember staring out the back window of our apartment watching a little boy play in the snow and having no way to tell my mom I wanted to do that. I proceeded to bang on the glass door until she figured it out. I remember being at my aunt's house alone in a room with a giant fish tank. I'd only been to that house one time in my life, my mom has told me, and I was fifteen months old. My long-term memory is great; short-term leaves something to be desired. So I was good. I was the kind of good that, if given the chance, you could leave me sitting on the sofa in the living room with a china cabinet full of beautiful china and milk glass and antique glass figurines placed tastefully throughout the living room. I would sit among the various ceramic birds. Their lifeless stare almost lifelike if you didn't know they weren't real. Once I could read, I would read their descriptions; Cardinal, Typically found in open woodland. My grandfather loved birds, and so did my grandma. I would count in my head; forward and backward. I would count other things. I imagined stuff. I would memorize things. I was really quite young when I taught myself the alphabet backward. And it was during a time I was alone. I needed to occupy myself; so I did. I didn't like being left alone, but I could handle it. I can clearly remember that quiet room decorated with clean floral prints and including an old tube TV which was rarely on, unless my grandma's programs were on. The news and 60 minutes were all she really watched. Oh, and my grandpa liked baseball. I would sit in that room, playing under the coffee table, which was permitted, and patiently wait for my mom as she and grandma caught up with each other on the happenings of the week.

So as I said, I was good. I listened. I was rarely the cause of contrition in the family. It was just mom and I. We lived in a small apartment in Portland. This doesn't mean I wasn't still curious. I've been told I was inquisitive, which I get, because I still am. One time, my mom left me in the car while she ran up to the apartment, and I pulled the gearshift in that ancient Plymouth from P to N and the car started rolling backward. For lack of slope I wasn't going far, but she jumped in the car and pulled the emergency break and instructed me to never touch it again. I didn't. The look on her face had pretty much scared me from ever wanting to maneuver a car in any way. My mom got pregnant again when I was two. The man in her life would be my dad for about six years or so. I actually forgot that he wasn't really my dad. In having a sister and then later a brother, we seemed like a perfectly constructed little family. We'd moved from the apartment to a tiny two-bedroom house in South East Portland. The house would qualify as a miniature, I didn't care. It wasn't located in a good area, and yet still I was happy. I would spend many days outside playing with the neighborhood children. It was a different time back then, when my mom wasn't afraid for me as I wandered the SE neighborhood. She also wasn't concerned that I had an imaginary friend named Ruby who showed up at sunset each evening. It was a close-knit community. My best friend was five years older than me and ended up having her first kid at fifteen. I'd sit on the front porch and pretend the address 6414 were buttons I needed to push in different orders, as fast as I could, to gain . . . entry or something. I was quite content, and good. I was always good.

I was told later that my dad would go a couple houses down to this lady named Brenda's house and get free of his stress. My mom hated that quite a bit. Brenda was apparently good at stress relief, as my friend across the street said that her mom said she caught her dad there one time, too.

One time my mom asked me to walk up to the corner store (I am not kidding I was five years old), to get a newspaper. She gave me fifty cents for the automatic depository they were sold in. I walked up there and inserted the coins. When the metal door swung open, I saw that I was to grab the top newspaper. None of the other newspapers were held in place, it was quite simply a stack. I thought for a minute and realized that Kat my neighbor across the street might like a paper, and probably Kay's mom next door would also. So I grabbed stack, thinking I was doing a good deed in thinking of others.

I walked home with my stack of newspapers and announced my great idea to my mom.

Monica! That's stealing!

I was shocked! I wasn't stealing, I was helping, right?

"That fifty cents is for one newspaper, not as many as you like. You're only to take one paper."

I was shocked and appalled. I'd stolen the newspapers.

Now that you know, never do it again! Please go to each of the neighbors and tell them what you did and ask if they would like a paper. I'll go dig up some change to put in the machine.

Chagrined, I walked from house to house early that morning distributing the papers, half-way as planned.

I suppose I developed strong instincts as to what was right and wrong from early on. Maybe all kids do, and they just ignore them for the most part. I knew that life wasn't perfect, but as a child goes, I was content. I did notice when my mom was stressed. Our electricity was turned off from time to time, and this would make her really upset. She would try and play flashlight games and we would hide in the dark, but I could see the skin around her eyes was tight and when she laughed I felt like she might cry at any moment.

By the time it all unraveled, I was eight, my mom a mere twenty-eight. Dad moved to a micro-apartment where we visited on the weekends. My mom chain-smoked herself into a pretty bad depression. Given what I know now, who knows what else she was doing. What I remember is that a lot of things my mom usually took care of suddenly became something that I could help with. And I also started to realize that my sister was maybe not so good. She was young but wickedly smart, she'd had stitches in her head twice by the time she was five. Rereading that makes me realize I'm not conveying her personality properly; you could not leave her alone in a room with china cabinet and collectable ceramic birds. She bounced off the walls, too much energy packed into a tiny blonde-haired firecracker. I certainly loved watching her antics. Although, considering she was young and clumsy, this left her on the other end of bumps and bruises, and like I said, a few times a bit worse. My brother was my baby. I remember telling my mom this, and I remember her acknowledging it more times than once. He was goofy, and thoughtful. I know he must have cried, but it was infrequent. When he was older, he and my sister fought like cats and dogs. It made my mother crazy, of course. Actually, I still to this day, do not understand what the heck was up with those two! But I get ahead of myself because until we moved to Sacramento, I didn't know how good we had it.

Chapter Two

My mom had a sordid history. I frankly do not know the entire scope of it. I don't want to know. In the end days of Oregon my mom started talking to a man, whom she knew from her past. I know she wanted us to like him. He would send her tapes, and she would play them for us. It was different than the old country music we were used to, but very instrumental and emotional and even as a young child I was drawn to it---The Doors, The Eagles. I remember a few others. They would talk on the phone. Then one day he rode up to our little house on a motorcycle. He stayed at our house, where Dad didn't live anymore, for a few days. Then he got back on the bike and rode away. I wasn't sure about the whole thing. My mom was falling over herself for him, and I knew she wanted me especially to like him. He wasn't bad; he tried to talk to me sometimes. He said he'd send me a tape, which he did. I don't recall him trying to engage my siblings. My mom talked about him nonstop. Suddenly she was excited and happy again. So I did what I started making a habit of doing; tried to please my mom and understand what she loved about this guy she'd brought into our lives.

The process just happened so fast. All of a sudden my mom had my sister and me sitting down. My brother was sleeping curled on the couch with his blanket. She said, Hon, (looking at me) we're moving to California.

I had no idea what that meant.

I remember driving somewhere in Oregon as a young child, another city, and repeatedly asking my mom and dad as we passed through city after city, if the president was the same in all of the cities. I remember my mom yelling, "Yes! Monica, every city we'll ever drive through has the same freaking president." Looking back, I think she was mostly irritated that the president at the time was Ronald Regan, and less that I was inquisitive.

So in what seemed like instantly as an eight-year-old, and what was probably more like a few weeks' time, we're loading up the car. It was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, ugly as sin. Beat up. And guess who was magnanimously making the drive with us? Mom's new guy. In fact, Rich was behind the wheel of that Cutlass that drove us away from my grandma and her summer garden. I was saying good-bye to my best friend from across the street, promising we would write each other letters. My dad wasn't there. We'd seen him the night before. When he came to the house, his eyes were so shiny. He'd held onto my sister and me really tight. He stroked our hair. He didn't say a word, I don't think. He just sat there with us while my mom and Rich busied themselves in the kitchen so we could have some space. My brother crawled on the floor that was empty of anything but the lone sofa we sat on. Dad would keep it. He'd be moving back into the house when we were gone. He honestly didn't have any furniture anyways. We always camped out when we went to his apartment. Thinking of him alone in that house after we were gone made me as sad as an eight-year-old can be emotionally. But he'd said his good-byes, so after the subsequent good-byes in the neighborhood, we drove away.

In the days leading up to that preposterously long drive I quizzed my mom about where we were going, Does Rich live in California?

Yes, he does.

Are we going to live close to him?

Yeah, we'll live near-by.

What's California like?

You'll see when we get there.

So as we crossed the border into a new state (where Ronald Reagan was still president!), I examined the terrain with wonder and curiosity. I was also starting to get a feel for how far away we were from Grandma and Grandpa, (8+ hours) and Dad. It started getting hotter, that's for sure, and our cat Midgie howled from her carrier.

Chapter Three

Sacramento was hot in April already. As far as landscape, I saw a lot of dead grass. Portland was green. You can't pick another color for it. Sacramento was taupe. Lots of houses built in the same mud-colors. They were made of stucco, not wood or brick. The house we pulled up to was one of these mud-houses. It had a small yard, and a two car garage. It was a single-family dwelling. It was also twice the size of our old house, and I thought---who gave Mom a big ole' house? Rich popped the trunk, and we piled out. The grass was overgrown, but browning from lack of water. A lone palm tree wavered near the entrance. And an old van was parked in front, spider webs streaming from side mirrors and undercarriage. It had windows, but they were all covered with what looked like make-shift curtains, tie-dyed. We walked into the house, which was like a furnace. My baby brother screaming his head off, mostly not only from being in the car for like fifty hours but also probably because it was so uncomfortably hot! Midgie yowled, I carried Drew and my mom heaved my sister who was clinging to her like a spider monkey. Rich, indifferent to the breakdown of our family unit, breezed inside to, Check on my cats.

The inside was clean. There were no personal effects, just a couch, huge speakers, and a TV. Off the living room were a kitchen and a den. It was pretty nice, and