#lostnotlost

In 15 days (who’s counting) I’m hopping on a plane to South Africa. Before starting the volunteering job I’ll spend 9 days in Kruger National Park, cruising around in my elephant-proof Ford Fiesta. Sounds like a piece of cake…

3 months ago I couldn’t even put a glass over a spider in my house and now I find myself studying snake species and popping anti-malaria tablets. I choose to ignore the stories I read about an elephant once flipping a car, the Mozambique spitting cobra that came to visit a girl in her toilet, or the lion that decided to bite into a guy’s tyre because…it looked tasty and it didn’t look like the driver was in a hurry to get anywhere?

I’m sure that despite the inevitable urge I’ll have to stick my head out the car window, tongue out like our old Weirmeraner, if I stay IN the car all will be well. This is assuming however that I don’t crash it first (a more difficult task for me than one might think)…

Here’s the plan to alert the emergency services mum when the blog suddenly stops…

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“Tell me about your mother.”

“How was your relationship with your mother?”

These questions and commands shit me to tears. Not least because I barely knew the woman. The universe knows, I wish I did. The things she could have told me, the things we could have done. The memories I would actually have. No, the questions annoy me because they have nothing to do with the case that landed me in counselling sessions in the first place. The more I deal with Nathanial, the more I feel like he’s on a fishing expedition of sorts. Several of the guys from my precinct, and precincts from the other boroughs, have long stated that the counselling is a turd gathering enterprise: they wanna get shit on you. Why? If you become a liability, speak out against too many above you getting back-handers and stuff, then they can coat you in a cake of shit for the media party. Or, if they need to bump you off the force, or post you somewhere else they can boot you, pull your pension and benefits all because you’re unstable. Do they use it for that? I don’t know. But my sessions? Nah man, Nathanial is far too interested in my Mom and not interested enough in Schenectady. Even when I get into living with Gran, or delve into the shit that went down with Rev. Halloran he brings things back to my mom, or the night on the farm.

“How did her work as a stripper effect my childhood?” It didn’t she was dead by the time I was 7, and I didn’t know what an exotic Dancer was until I was about 8 years older and didn’t know she was one till I was 16 and Gran was trying to make me feel like shit. Gran issues I got, mommy or daddy issues I don’t. The truth is, aside from a cookie and staring at the black stars I don’t remember much of anything about that night. My childhood before that? I was six I was a kid I went to school in town. I had friends. We had cows and a couple of pigs and my neighbours grew corn. Me and my school friends used to go play hide and seek in the corn fields. We lived away from town, and my friends were mostly white because it was a predominantly white town. Hell, so was my Dad. Mom used to get some strange looks when we’d go into town to go shopping, but that was more likely on account of her blonde hair than our color. It might have been predominantly white, but we weren’t the only combination family. And we were comfortably middle class, albeit first time farmers. But the folks seemed to have a handle on the cattle trade. We didn’t seem to want for anything, but what can a six year old tell about that shit anyway.

The past is the past, why can’t they just leave it that way and let me move forward. I don’t have regular dreams about my mom, but I do about that fucking houseboat. The other bad memories? Well, there’s Gran.

“Let me tell you about my Gran.” She could be a ferocious bitch. I don’t like using that term, but when she had some scotch in her there ain’t another word. If she wasn’t running a mouth full of razors at you trying to cut you down, she reaching for her belt. That woman beat me more than any man has, or will. I’d never been touched in anger by an adult till I lived with gran. That was part of the problem, according to her. Her anger at who Mom fell in love with, and the choices she made, landed on my back. Her sadness ended up, time after time, in my tears, not hers. I remember when Gran and I were having one of the last big blow-ups. I’d been bought home by the local cops, the deputy was understanding with me. I think he remembered being a kid, he took more for a burger and shake before dropping me home. He’d found me trying to hitch my way to the interstate just out of town. I can’t remember his name, just his Smokey and the Bandit moustache and his apologetic eyes when he left me with Gran. They were mature yes, knowing eyes, eyes that knew Gran’s embarrassment was gonna hurt me, a lot. And it did. Her first words:

“Do you know how embarrassing it is having my granddaughter acting like a vagabond? Do you know what the neighbours are going to say? What they’ll say at service on Sunday?”

It wasn’t about me. No. It was all about her. And I get it, she had it hard growing up. Even harder raising kids, given the nature of her marriage and when that was. Our racism today, compared to theirs? I can’t know it. I can only know what I know, you know? I can empathize, and try to understand. I used to ask her about it. I’d pry about what it was like being in an interracial relationship back then, how bad was it? Those questions. And she’d be all like. “That was the past child, better to live in the now.” And that would be that. She’d talk broadly, you know, about struggles and protests. But mostly it was about raising a family on her own. And about how mom just high-tailed it soon as she could, not like her sisters who stuck around. Only, they didn’t. As soon as my Mom ran, the others left too. One by one my aunties left Gran to her sharp tongue and bottles of scotch. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think Gran relished the opportunity to raise me so she’d have the opportunity to complain about something other than her own choices. But, only in the cynical moments, yeah? Because “what will they say on Sunday?” is such a caring and concerned response to a runaway. And when I tried to bring up my issues with her, why I was upset and wanted to leave, she got onto the Mother tirade.

“You know that Mother of yours ran away to be a stripper, and probably a hooker too? What do you think of that? How do you like your Mom now?” I didn’t think anything of it. Shit, to be honest, at that moment I had the same economic masterplan to get away from the woman myself. I didn’t tell her that. But I said “I can’t judge her choices because I never walked in her shoes, not exactly. But I can guess.” And that bought me the strap.

Gran would story-tell while she gave strokes. She’d pin you down, twisting an ear or pulling your hair. That’s why I kept my hair cropped. I had to wait till I left Gran to find out if my hair would go blonde, like Mom’s (it didn’t), because she’d grab a fistful of afro or braid to hold you down and lift your shirt or rip down your pants and then drag you to get the strap. With my cropped hair, she’d go for the ear. I’ve got a boxer’s ear from her. Mostly folks think it’s from my kickboxing and sparring and stuff, but it’s from Gran. And that time? She told me all about my Mom’s insalubrious career as a dancer in roadhouses and stripper over on the West coast. I doubt she knew shit about it. It was meant to hurt me, I’m pretty sure. She spoke of her stripping for money and sponging off “men’s lecherous needs to make a living, cos she weren’t no good for nothing else.” Between strokes she told me how the only reason she and Dad married was because of her getting pregnant, because it was the only way she knew how to get out of that hole. I know that ain’t true. My aunt, Janey, she told me that Mom and Dad met at some festival in San Francisco, some Woodstock kind of thing. Mom had danced, but it was more like a couple of gigs here and there to get cash between paying jobs like cashier work and retail. Dad was a young accountant who’d discovered the hippy movement as was tired of his conservative background. She didn’t like him, my aunt. And she wasn’t fond of mom, none of my aunts are. I can’t tell if they felt betrayed that she, the youngest, left first, or if they’re jealous that she got more of her youth than they did. My aunts got college, though. Not something that Mom did. But it only did Janey any good. She got into publishing. Selma, Janice, and Lucy had mixed fortunes. Maybe I’ll get into them one day with you. I don’t really know any of them to speak of them, though. They’d come for thanksgiving and sometimes stick around for Christmas, but they preferred to call rather than visit. No, visiting was rare for them, even for Selma and Lucy who actually lived in Virginia.

No, the issue was always my Gran. Never my mother. I know in my heart that if she were around, I wouldn’t have had to deal with Gran’s mouth and belt. Or good ol’ boy Rev. Halloran and his Baptist “teachings”.