How to Grow an Addict Read online

  I shook my head side to side until she told me to sit down and eat some breakfast.

  A few minutes later, as I headed to the front door, I heard her say, “Do you know what the word ‘yellow’ means?”

  “Sure I do, it’s a color—like a lemon or a banana.”

  “Actually it can mean ‘cowardly’ too. I’ll have a word with Robbie about all this tonight,” she said.

  Robbie spent the next year threatening to have a few of his friends beat me up if I ever said a word to anyone about what had happened in his bedroom. He also spent a lot of time in his room with the guy who ran the bowling alley, but only on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when Mom worked late. That guy was spooky, and I didn’t like him. I wondered why Robbie wanted a friend so much older. After a few weeks, though, I got used to the guy coming over and hearing them grunt and moan.

  After Mom came home early from work one day and saw Robbie walk from the kitchen to the bathroom with hardly any clothes on, I began to offer my lookout services to Robbie in exchange for five dollars each time. I promised to knock three times on his bedroom door if our parents called or came home. I made a bunch of money that year, more than sixty dollars.

  That was also the year I met my half-sister, Tammy, and the year Dad went to jail for trying to kill his brother Bill.

  CHAPTER 2

  I don’t know if my Dad really meant to kill his own brother, but it sure looked like it. It happened when I was eight, on one of the days between Christmas and New Years in 1983. I’d spent most of the morning helping Dad clean up his car garage and putting screws and bolts in the colored glass storage jars Mom bought him for Christmas. He wanted the place to be spic-and-span.

  “I’ve invited some of my family over for dinner and I don’t want them to think we live in a dump, so make sure you sweep the driveway and the porch,” he told me when I was helping him carry his shopping from his truck to the garage bar: four bottles of Canadian Club, two bottles of Beefeater Gin, and a six-pack of tonic water. We had two garages: a two-car garage connected to our house, and a much bigger garage, big enough to fit six of Dad’s classic cars inside, behind our house.

  I mopped his big garage floor and swept the driveway and sidewalk like he asked me to, all the while trying to remember what I’d heard from Aunt Flo about their family.

  Aunt Flo was Dad’s twin. She and Uncle Hank lived in a big cottage house about a mile from us. It was a lot more fun being at their house than mine and they didn’t seem to mind having me stay, so I did, every chance I got. Aunt Flo was always busy with her garden and Uncle Hank was always busy talking to his friends and neighbors. I liked to listen to him talk. He sounded a little like Latka on the TV show Taxi.

  I often heard Uncle Hank and Aunt Flo talk about their families, so I knew that my Dad went to a Catholic high school, that Aunt Flo once considered becoming a nun, and that their mother was Irish and very sweet and their father was Dutch and Scottish and didn’t like kids. I also knew they’d grown up on a cattle farm just outside of San Bernardino and that Dad had joined the Marines when he was eighteen to get away from his father.

  I was excited about meeting Dad’s other sisters, my aunts, and wondered if they’d be anything like Aunt Flo. I think Mom was excited about them coming over as well because she got up really early and cleaned every room before she started making dinner.

  Dad didn’t seem happy about the dinner or about seeing his sisters or brother. He was grumpy and asked me to make him a drink at about 3 p.m., just after I finished cleaning the dirty shot glasses he’d left on his garage workbench. I mixed his whiskey and water “kind of weak,” the way Mom always told me to.

  “This isn’t a drink, it’s water,” Dad said. “Leave the bottle on the bench and go get changed into one of those dresses your mom is always buying for you. My sisters are snobs and you need to look presentable. And keep your fingers out of your mouth—got it?”

  I went to my room to put on my new red velour jumper, and to put Band-Aids on the all the fingers I’d bitten that morning.

  Four of my six aunts arrived in the same car at 5.30 p.m., and Dad started yelling at them before they even got into the house. He thought they’d parked too close to our garage door and he wanted them to move. He was also pissed off about the little poodle they’d brought along.

  “Why can’t you leave that mutt at home, Gert? It doesn’t need to go every goddamn place you do,” he growled at Gert who’d driven and who had a beehive hairdo that was so high she had to hold it in place as she got out of the car.

  Since it was their first time at our house and they didn’t know Dad’s rules about parking, I told the tallest one I could move the car for them. They all looked at me, and one of them asked if I knew how to drive. That’s when Dad yelled out, “Damn right she knows how to drive! She can hit a baseball out of the park, too.”

  They each took my hand and introduced themselves as they got out of the car and headed toward our front door. It was easy for me to remember Gert (the one with the beehive and the little black poodle) and Violet (the shortest one), but I got Ivy and Angelis mixed up. “ Don’t worry, I have a hard time remembering all of our names myself,” Ivy laughed as she squeezed my hand.

  I moved their car a few feet back and then went into the house to help Mom. “It’s weird how much they all look alike. I can see Aunt Flo in each of them, but not much of Dad,” I told Mom.

  “Wait until your Uncle Bill gets here, he’s the spitting image of your Dad,” she said.

  The sisters were all tall, thin redheads. They walked the same way, they all spoke alike, with a low tone that was familiar to me, and they had a unique cackle-laugh that I sometimes heard in myself. They were all beautiful, but none of them was as glamorous as Aunt Flo.

  I was happy to meet them, and I made them all a Harvey Wallbanger before I left them in the dining room with Dad to go help Mom in the kitchen. I was mashing potatoes when Dad came in and poured himself a tall glass of whiskey.

  “That asshole brother of mine is late as usual. Let’s not wait for him. They’re all hungry and I’d like to get this over with as soon as possible.”

  “You shouldn’t drink like that today,” Mom said to him.

  “Don’t tell me what I shouldn’t do,” he sniped.

  My aunts said all kinds of nice things when Mom and I brought the fried chicken and mashed potatoes to the table, but no one said anything while they ate, which made me wonder if they’d noticed the gravy was burnt. We were almost finished eating when Dad said, “Listen up, I’ve waited long enough for my share of Mom and Dad’s house. I’ve got a son signed up for Cal State and it’s expensive. Don’t you think it’s time for Gert and Rose to move out and get their own place so we can settle up?”

  Gert put her fork down and made a big huff sound before she called him a greedy, selfish crackpot. “If I’d known you were inviting me over here to bully me into moving out of my home, I wouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “It’s not your home. Mom and Dad left the house to all of us. Why do you need to live in such a big place anyway? Christ, if we sell it, you’ll get enough money to buy a nice condo that doesn’t need all the maintenance of Mom and Dad’s house,” Dad replied.

  “It’s not about the money. Mom wanted Rose to stay at home for as long as she could and you know it,” Gert said.

  “Jesus Christ . . . Mom’s been dead for ten years!” Dad yelled.

  “You’re still as mean as ever,” Gert snapped.

  I could hear their youngest sister, Violet, crying—we all could—but they didn’t seem fazed by it, didn’t even offer her a tissue, and I was too scared to do anything, so I just kept my head down and picked at the Band-Aid I’d put on my left thumbnail earlier.

  I was grateful when Mom walked into the dining room a few minutes later with a large bread pudding in her hands and broke up the argument. “Let’s not talk about this right now. I’ve made your mom’s bread pudding, and my little helper here”— she winked
at me—“made a nice vanilla custard.”

  We ate dessert in silence, and when Uncle Bill arrived, just after we’d finished, Dad went outside to meet him. That’s when things got loud. I heard Dad’s truck start up, so I went outside to see what was going on, and it looked to me like Dad was trying to run over Uncle Bill as he was running back down the street to his car. It also looked like Genie, the secretary of Dad’s car club, was sitting in the front seat of Uncle Bill’s car.

  Dad missed Bill, but not by much, and the truck kept going and didn’t stop until it hit the house across the street. It smashed the Kendricks’ living room window and only came to a stop when the top of their porch fell down onto the hood of the Dad’s truck.

  I watched Dad try to reverse the truck, but it wouldn’t move. The wheels just spun and smoked, and pieces of grassy lawn flew everywhere. Mr. Kendrick came out of his house with a baseball bat. He knocked out Dad’s front and back lights, smashed what was left of the windshield, and dented the hood and the doors, all the while screaming at Dad, “I’m gonna knock your fucking block off!”

  My aunts stood on our driveway with my mom, Robbie, and me, all of us watching. And I’m pretty sure the entire neighborhood, including my friends the twins and their parents, were out on the street watching as well.

  “Oh shit!” I heard Mom say really loud at the very same moment I heard the sirens. One fire truck and two cop cars arrived in the next minute and parked right in the middle of the street, blocking our view of Dad’s truck and the Kendricks’ porch. We all walked down the sidewalk until we were almost to Uncle Bill’s parked car. That’s when I noticed how much Uncle Bill looked like my Dad, but with hair. It’s also when Mom noticed Genie in the front seat next to Uncle Bill, watching the action in the Kendricks’ front yard.

  “Of course. It’s all about her!” Mom screamed as she turned and ran into the house.

  The cops spent a while trying to convince Dad to unlock his door. “Sir, you need to unlock the door now,” I heard one of them yell out.

  After a few minutes of waiting, the cop signaled a fireman over to Dad’s truck, and I was more scared than ever as I watched him break the door lock with an axe and pull Dad out of his truck.

  They pulled his arms back, handcuffed him, and pushed him into the backseat of their squad car. One of the firemen had to hold Mr. Kendrick back because he took a swing at Dad when the cops were handcuffing him and almost hit him. I wished he hadn’t missed; I really wanted Dad to get clobbered, just once, real hard.

  Robbie took off with one of his friends who’d arrived in time to see Dad get arrested, and everyone else (except the Kendricks and the firemen) went back to their homes or cars, except for Uncle Bill. He got out of his car and came into the house to tell Mom he was going to press charges. I was at the door when he arrived on the porch.

  “Where’s your mom? I want to talk to her,” he said.

  “I’ll see if she wants to talk,” I replied as I turned around to see if she was in the kitchen.

  “Why’d you bring her to my house? You know better,” Mom yelled out from the kitchen.

  Uncle Bill walked into the kitchen, so I leaned against the sink and pretended I was getting a glass of water.

  “We’re getting married,” Bill said.

  “Ha! Give me a break. She’s not going to marry you. She’s just using you—and I wouldn’t have minded one little bit if you’d both been run over,” Mom replied.

  From my place in the hallway I could see my uncle smirk and then I heard him say, “You know, Susan, you’ve always been dumb as dirt.”

  Mom fired back, “Dumb enough to know a Nothing when I’m looking at it.”

  He turned to walk out the door, and she threw her beer bottle at him, hitting him on his left shoulder. I thought Uncle Bill was going to turn around and clobber Mom, but he kept walking. He didn’t even slam the door on his way out.

  I brought Mom another beer like she asked me to. She drank most of it in one go. “I just don’t know what to do anymore,” she cried out.

  I was scared, so I called Olive, Mom’s best friend since junior high school, and told her about Dad and asked if she could come over.

  “I can’t come over right now, honey, but hand the phone to your mom and go find her bottle of Xanax, probably in her bedroom or in her purse,” she said.

  I gave the phone to Mom and then sprinted down the hallway to get her medication. After Mom had finished talking to Olive, she looked at me with sad eyes and said, “I’m sorry about today,” then swallowed two Xanax. I sat next to Mom on the couch while she dozed off, all the while thinking about Uncle Bill and Genie and wondering why Genie hadn’t told me she was going to marry my uncle. It had only been about a week since I’d helped her with the decorations at the annual Classic Car Club Christmas party, the same party where I saw Dad kiss her under a piece of mistletoe. I thought about calling Aunt Flo to ask her about Genie, but I was afraid I’d wake up Mom.

  CHAPTER 3

  In my opinion, if my dad had just been a bit nicer, everything would have been perfect. But he didn’t have much niceness about him. I used to think it was because of his age. He was forty-five when I was born on June 1, 1975, and I don’t think he really wanted me. Robbie was born just after my parents got married in 1967, and it was pretty obvious they wanted him, because his baby pictures were all over the house.

  Dad worked for a big company as a salesman and traveled a lot, sometimes for a week or two. If he wasn’t at work, at a car auction, or at one of his club shows, he was in his big garage restoring one of his cars. I was allowed to be in the garage, but only if I kept myself busy and didn’t ask him “stupid” questions. He said I specialized in asking stupid questions, so I’d do my best to keep my mouth from moving and stay out of his way unless he needed me to hold something or hand him a tool.

  I became a really good helper. I was especially good at polishing hubcaps, oiling tires, and cleaning leather car seats with toothpaste and old T-shirts, just the way Dad’s friend Mike from the car club showed me. I also swept the floor, kept both of the garage fridges stocked with beer, and taught myself how to siphon gas from one gas tank to another with a garden hose Dad had cut up for just this purpose. Although it took me a few months to get it right, and I got myself drenched a few times, I didn’t mind because I loved the smell of gasoline. Sometimes, when I thought I could get away with it, I’d put a little bit on a rag and take it to bed with me.

  Dad’s garage had several workbenches, two old leather recliner chairs, a mechanic’s pit, two beer fridges, and a bar with every type of whiskey in the world, as he used to tell everyone. His friend Mike gave him an old jukebox and helped wire its speakers into the ceiling of the garage. It only had fifty songs on it, and they were mostly Glen Campbell tunes, but Dad always let me choose which one to play. We both knew the words to every song, and it was fun to sing along with Dad while he sang along with Glen. I told Dad he had a much better voice than Glen Campbell and he agreed, but he said Glen was one hell of a bagpipe player, and his guitar playing wasn’t bad either, “and that’s why Mr. Campbell is so famous.”

  Restoring cars and country music weren’t the only things Dad liked; he also liked “Bourbon, Cigs, and Big Tits.” I know this because it was written out on a blackboard sign hanging on the only wall of his big garage not decorated with Playboy centerfolds. He had every one from the years 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1978, and a few from the olden days, 1967 and 1968. I knew all “his girls” pretty well and I liked the dark ones best, the ones with the rounder boobs. It seemed to me they had friendlier smiles, nicer than the cute little smiles of the blondes or the smirky grins of the redheads. Dad liked his blondes the best, and the bigger the boobs the more he liked them. “No use having great tits and hiding them under clothes,” he told me one day when I was about eight and Mrs. Benson had just driven her 1972 red Chevelle up to the open doors of Dad’s big garage to get see if he would check her oil before she drove to San Fr
ancisco to visit her sister. It was the first time she’d ever seen the inside of the garage, and when she saw Dad’s collection of centerfolds all over the walls her mouth dropped open. She put her hands on her hips and in a real scary voice said, “What the hell is all of this? Are you crazy?”

  “Those are Dad’s posters, not mine,” I said, really fast and really loud.

  Dad just laughed and took a long drag of his cigarette. After he put some oil in her car, he said, “When you wanna get rid of this thing let me know. I’ll give you a decent price.”

  “When you wanna get rid of those disgusting pictures on your walls let me know. I’ll do a decent job,” she replied.

  “They’re just boobs. We all got ’em.” He grinned as she pulled away.

  He told me after she left that I should pay more attention to what I ate and get lots of exercise because it might help me develop a “decent rack.”

  “A good set is the ticket into the Playboy mansion, and even if you don’t become a centerfold bunny, I hear the tips at the club are pretty good,” he said.

  I found out that I had a half-sister, Tammy, by accident when I was in third grade. She was Dad’s daughter from his first marriage, and she was twenty-three when I was born. I met her when our teacher, Mrs. Hodge, left to have a baby, and she substituted for our class. The first day back at school, after Christmas break, we all had a bag of jellybeans on our desks and a little note explaining that our teacher’s baby had come and she wouldn’t be back the rest of the school year. When the substitute teacher wrote her name on the blackboard I thought it was interesting that we had the same last name. On my way out to recess I stopped by her desk.

  “My last name is Grange,” I said.

  She smiled at me and said, “Is your dad’s name Randall too?”

  “Yes,” I replied.