Chapter 11: The Dark
Chapter Eleven The Dark
Forty was the worst. Slumped on the front room couch of the house on Northwest Lincoln Street in the filtered July sunlight, I reviewed all the misadventures and sidewinder movement of my life. Making a list of men who had come within intimacy range since that first and only marriage at 18, I counted the poet who taught me to love French prose poetry, the vagabond mystic who passed through my stay at Emerson College, the painter I met in Berkeley on my return from Russia who encouraged me to try more art forms, the ethereal addict who visited my pre-Haight-Ashbury apartment, the photographer who left me some wonderful black and white photos of my early motherhood, the Economic Opportunity Council co-worker at my first job off welfare in Marin County, the conscientious objector from the Ali Akbar College of Music, the bass player from a minor Marin County rock band, and ten times more in between. I could number on one hand how many of them were real love stories in the sense of imagining a Rest of My Life Future. Those were inevitably doomed and the rest were minor adventures.
Jane went with friends to Canada that summer, and Josh led his Pee Wee Mets team to victory at the playgrounds. In the fall, Josh began his last year of middle school and Jane her first in high school. We observed the holidays and birthdays at my parents' house with all the trimmings and food. As my world darkened, I paid little attention to the events of the day - the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting U.S. boycott of the Olympic Games, Dylan's first Grammy for the song Gotta Serve Somebody. I had been with the Anthropology Department for a little over four years by then and the other staff and faculty were becoming ever more aware of my disintegration.
Sometime in the spring my luck ran out. I was summoned to the Department Chairman's office and told that everybody there was talking about my drinking. I was mortified but my reaction was to quit my job and go to work elsewhere. I don't remember now how I made that passage so easily (I'm guessing they pitied me enough not to destroy my references), but by May I had become the Administrative Secretary to the Nursing Department at the local hospital, beginning 26 years of employment in medical institutions until retirement in 2006. I liked the feeling of working in a hospital - the daily drama even at my level. I got craftier about the drinking - took a tiny flask of hard liquor with me in my purse and plenty of breath mints. It was too far from home now to go there during lunch break and drink, so that helped. By the summer of 1980, all seemed reasonably on track on the surface.
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Two days before I turned 41, Mt. St. Helens, which had erupted first on May 18, blew again, pushing ash 10 miles into the sky. Other than that the summer passed without incident and the children returned to school. When my six-month evaluation came in November, I was pronounced an "outstanding employee." The year ended with two significant deaths - my Uncle Albert on December 15 and John Lennon on December 8. Never having known my uncle that well, I'm sure I felt the shock of Lennon's death the most.
Life was about to turn a big corner for Josh in his first year at junior high school. He had hit 13, the age of puberty and girls. I don't remember the exact details, but there were some incidents that began to happen of the "I wouldn't want one to date my daughter" variety. In the sports arena, race had not been an issue. His grades at school began to slip a little and there was one particular situation that brought me to the school in rage, where he had been allowed to sit in a photography class and flunk it because he didn't have a camera. Again, I don't remember the exact details but take some of the blame myself for having let that happen and not caught it sooner.
In the spring there was an attempt on President Reagan's life and in Ireland Bobby Sands died at age 27 in a hunger strike in Long Kesh prison trying to regain Special Category status for Irish Republican prisoners, resulting in a new surge of IRA recruitment and activity. At home, my activist parents were busily involved in local grassroots levy elections. Just after I turned 42, in the summer of 1981, IBM produced its first personal computer (Model 5150) with a whopping 256 kB memory. Little did any of us know how deeply enmeshed we would become with our PC's over the next few decades.
I don't remember much else about that summer though there are photos of Josh in his usual sports uniforms and a certificate for Jane completing 77 hours as a volunteer at the hospital where I worked. That fall we made another beach trip just before school started.
In December came the first rumblings of the AIDS epidemic. News reported 75 deaths between July and December from a mysterious illness killing homosexual men. It would take years for full understanding of this disease.
Sometime between that winter and the next summer, I met my last romantic match in a bar. I rarely went to bars, but that's where I spotted him and so began a relationship that would last over the next few years. He was a slender, good-looking, intense, moody loner who loved boats and sailing and was self-employed as a contractor. He took me on a long sailboat trip in Puget Sound during the time we were together, and today he lives even further north on the San Juan Islands with his wife, who is a painter. I wish him well.
In the spring back to the ocean with my parents and the kids. It was the last one of those trips. My new man began to interact with my parents and children over the summer months, even meeting Josh's father who came for a visit in the fall. I have many photos from Christmas 1982, all taken at my parents' house. My dad looks like he is tired. He and I are both smoking. My mother tried so hard to make it all festive for us each holiday, so there are bright colors in each shot. They had a standard small tree but also a wonderful handmade tree built by my father, which held bright red candles at the end of each limb and was decorated with other hanging ornaments and gingerbread cookies in the shape of animals.
And so the year passed and 1983 arrived. It was an especially gloomy time in the Cold War. President Reagan branded the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, and in April the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon was bombed, killing over 60 people. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in history at that time.
At home, there was exciting news. Jane was accepted at Reed College for her freshman year. She had done all the required things - kept up great grades, stayed out of trouble, community volunteer work. It probably helped that so many family members were alumni. The whole family participated in discussions and plans for her future. My father was skeptical about her chances, but she proved him wrong by graduating from Reed four years later. Unfortunately, he didn't live to know it.
Josh was having a much harder time. On his last day of classes that year, another student dogged him around the hallways all day calling him racial epithets. Coming out of his last class, the student was still there and this time Josh decked him. It was the first time he had ever hit anyone in his life. The school called me at work to apologize and express concern. I went looking for Josh, found him, brought him home, and he sat on the couch and wept. It was the proverbial nail in the coffin. I decided we were going to move to Portland where Josh would at least have a chance at more diversity in school, and we could be closer to Jane as she started her college years.
As summer began, Jane left with her high school French class for a 2-week trip to Europe, during which she took a side trip to Switzerland to meet her father and his family. It took a lot of courage and hope to make that visit, and sadly it was emotionally traumatic. I bought a used Dodge Colt that summer and made trips to Portland to scout for a home for us. Having cashed out my pension savings from OSU, I had enough for a big deposit and first and last on a house near Reed College. It had an attic and basement and back yard and large outside deck and two-car garage. The hardest thing was that I couldn't leave my job in Corvallis until October, so Josh had to live alone in that house for a few weeks as he started his sophomore year in Portland at Cleveland High School. Jane was close by in her dorm at Reed, but it was one of my biggest regrets that I couldn't make that situation safer. Josh called me one night terrified that someone was trying to break in. We had to call Jane to come over and be with him.
Finally, I was there too though, and almost immediately landed a job at the switchboard at Eastmoreland General Hospital, a tiny osteopathic hospital between our house and Reed College. Over the following several months, I was also trained to work at the emergency room desk admitting patients. And during this time, my body began to break down from the years of addiction. By March 1984, I was beginning to see doctors regularly and a blood test impression read: "The finding of microcytic erythrocytes suggests underlying drug effect. Liver disease is also included in the differential diagnosis." The treatment was "wait and see if it goes away." Oh, and prescribed Tylenol with codeine - my first encounter with opiates. In April a barium colon exam for continued abdominal pain and more codeine. As my job was once again close enough to home, I drank in the morning before work, though I wasn't able to go home at lunch. But one day a nurse slapped a package of Certs down on the counter beside me in the ER and said the same words I'd heard in Corvallis years before - "everybody here is talking about your drinking." Within days I had left that job and taken a job at Reed College as faculty secretary to the Biology Department. In May a flexible sigmoidoscopy and pelvic ultrasound. More codeine. In June more tests including a back x-ray because now the pain was traveling to my lower back. More codeine. In this state, I reached my 45th birthday that July and now I had but six months to wait for the light.
The leaves turn upon their
golden stems
and it is autumn -
In the morning early I wander
vacant streets gathering silence
and leaving only footsteps hesitant
behind -
It comes to me then in the clean
cold air
that I too long to turn upon
my stem -
I have a rightful place among the seasons.
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