I only have eyes for you

A Simple Memory

My mother was bald in the middle of chemotherapy treatments. I had just returned from England. I was drunk, she was sedated and we were stuck in traffic. The Oregon sky hung gray over us. ‘I Only Have Eyes for You,’ by the Flamingos came on the radio. She spoke.
“When I was in the hospital as a child for polio, there was one radio station I got all night. In those days it was rare to find a really cool DJ because all the good RandB was on FM, and FM then was low power. AM was everywhere.”
I had to pee.
“I would spend all night alone and scared. I was young. Like seven, so pain was scary. The medication would hit me strong, but then it would go away. And I would be alone in this crib in a dark room alone. It was scary. Anyway, I had a radio. It was one of those small transister radios. It lay next to me all night and I really got to fall for those DJ’s.”
The traffic moved alittle bit. A woman howled as she pushed a shopping cart. I eyed a fastfood resturant yearning to use the bathrooms. The song ended and my mother turned off the radio.
“Well, one night this guy locks himself in the booth, you know, DJ’s did that when they wanted to get famous or they heard a record they couldn’t get enough of. The song he played all night was, ‘’I Only Have Eyes For You.’ I listened to that song all night long.”
My mother was reflective for a while. The silence grew between us and she put on the radio again.




Cavalier

It was a Chevy Cavalier, an 86 I think. It had gears, many of them. I only used one. My brother had just listed the ways my father was killing him, vomited on his shoes and handed me the keys to the car. I was twelve, as good a time as any to drive drunk.
While my brother put some deafening music on, I compelled the car to move by turning the keys while in gear. This gave me the momentum need to slam the car into second gear and to get under way.
There is one rule when driving a stick shift when drunk and twelve. Don’t stop. Stopping recreates the annoying situation where in you must regain forward momentum, so I ignored stopsigns, peeling around corners.
We crossed Burnside street, the big four laned street near my childhood home, without incident. My brother stumbled into the hosue and passed out.
I lay in bed reliving every corner, sobering quickly.

I was twenty five and homeless. I decided to try home one last time. I think my brother was similarly washed up, living between the basement and a hippie coop in a near by college town. Our parents swooped in and out treating us like the strange the pathetic men we were. My brother coped with his situation with marrijuana. I did so with speed, Jim Beam and any opiate I could find.
I think maybe I am glamorizing the situation, there were no redeaming qualities to it. There were no quirky moments of clarity, no hints of a better future. I cried like a baby every night and held jobs long enough to get one paycheck, then blew the money on onxycontin I bought from menaposal baby boomers. It was a disgusting life style. I promise you, it was as bad as anything I thought I was running away from in Philadelphia, only now I had run out of places to run. I wrote a suicide note, but new noone but my father would read it, and he would have trouble seeing past the spelling and gramar errors, so I didn’t bother leaving it. I took my regular dose of liqor took my parents car.
The roads are windy by my childhood home. I knew them quite well having driven them in many different moods in many different cars with many different girls. The near by park I spent many new years, drunk, sober, alone, making love. I drove fast, trying to squeeze a tiny bit of adrenaline out of a narrow escape. I crashed and woke up with a broken nose and a mouth full of blood.
My parents lied to the police with the quiet neausiated stoicism I could have benifited from adopting.
It was after that when I really started drinking.
There is one memory to be pulled from that dark time. My mother hugged me farewell as I left one last time on an all night bus. She had said goodbye many times before, but this time she ment it.


We were driving a bay side rural road. I rolled down the window. I could hear sea lions. I don’t know where we woke up, but we both knew we were in no shape to consider to it. I felt like a fop talking to her, she could be so much more mature than me, especially when she was driving that pickup. I rolled up the window when I began to salivate. I looked at the road swaying in front of us, the momentum on the turns gently rocking me too and fro.
“You’re quiet,” she said, her eyes fixed forward.
“I’m about to come up with something brilliant.”
I rolled down the window again, earning me a punitive glance. I made fists and made my body rigid. This worked for a while, but then the road sharply rose and fell.
“How do you feel, tiger?” She asked.
“Pretty normal,” I said, seeing my face resembled the overcast sky in the drivers side mirror.
“Hold on,” she turned sharply onto a gravel road, which went through a trailer park. A dog briefly chased the pickup. She finally stopped at a trailer at the very end, nearest the water. She got out and walked towards the door. I followed.
The inside was bright, filled with papers bills and photographs. I sat down in a dinning nook and felt the blood return to my face. The sea lions were quite near and loud. Who lives here? I asked her as she disappeared around the corner.
“My mom,” she returned with several orange pill bottles and lay them out on the table.
“Moms are good for this, among other things,” I said, gritting my teeth looking out the window.
“I think these are vicodin. This one might be oxy. She sort of pours them all together,” she took my hand put seven or so pills in it. Her hands were as dirty as mine. She then stood up and replaced the bottles. Retrieving bottle of wine from a cabinet, she swallowed a few pills with a swig. This seemed to break her distant mood. She walked over to the sink and leaned over, staring into the drain. I took a few of mine and we sat there for a while.
“Lets go.”
Now the road seemed to lightly bounce us from beneath. The clouds were a light clean cotton. “Do you ever get those moods?” I asked.
“Moods?”
“That feeling... so damn dark. So terrifying,” I had committed to the inquiry and I now had the strength to look her in the eyes... but she was driving and her returning my gaze could prove dangerous.
“Yes,” she said.
“It’s worse than awful. I can only talk about it when I’m not in it,” I leaned my face against the open window frame.
“It’s...” she trailed off.
“...a bastard,” I said.
“Like everything is a painting made on top of pure black. And where the black shows through is horrifying,” I noticed crows flying in the white sky and it chilled me. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. She watched me watch the crows.