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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (20 page)

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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My father escaped from prison when I was five. My father is well known for his escapes. Connecticut, Mexico, Connecticut, Florida, Connecticut, Nevada, Connecticut. On the Florida break, the prison officials had made a mistake by letting him get his teeth fixed at a civilian dentist’s office. He was left alone for two minutes. By the end of the first minute he had found a door with the word “Exit” above it and was gone. He was out for a year and a half before they caught him again. During his break, however, he came through Dallas where we were living at that point. He stayed for a few days in various hotels with various lackeys around him, but one night it was just him, and me, and my mom, and the Galleria Mall.
 
The biggest mall in Dallas, and I think at one point in Texas, the Galleria has a glass sunroof and five levels and a large ice-skating rink where I still dream that one day some man will propose to me. I spent my childhood shopping there with my grandmother, my teen years loitering there with friends, and now as an adult, we still go for last minute holiday gifts and lunch at the Corner Bakery. But for some reason, we went there one night—my mom, my dad, and me. It was the last time I would ever be with my father outside of prison walls and certainly the last time that I would be with both parents together.
 
I can still see the lush brown carpet, the stores beginning to the close, the Chinese restaurant I thought was really fancy at the time. I remember walking up ahead a bit and turning around to see my parents holding hands. The three of us went to a record store. My dad had bought me a Polaroid that day, and so one of them snatched a picture of me in front of the kids’ records. And my look is priceless. I am standing there in my little red sweater with a heart patch sewn on the front. My blonde hair dangles around my face. My eyes are stretched wide in fear or shock or paralysis, or perhaps all three. I am adorable, but as Lidia says when I show her the picture, “Wow. Are you caught up in your head or what?”
 
Because though this night is supposed to be the best night of my life, though I have been waiting and praying for this night for nearly two years, though I am finally getting everything I want—this night with my mom and dad—I am caught entirely off guard. If a five-year-old is capable of an anxiety attack, it appears I am in the midst of one. It is the same look I have on my face when I begin to like someone, and I fear that they are pulling away. And it is the same feeling I go through while talking with my father that day, driving on the 10, listening to his bullshit stories about the day I was born.
 
I found out recently that Lidia is a form of shaman called a curandera. She has been trained by the native peoples of Peru and Mexico to bring the special brand of healing that happens in the little room where we now sit. She is curled up in her chair, still in her loose white linens, and smiles, saying “Sweetheart, we can only love as much as we are willing to be hurt. And I can’t imagine that after years of loving your dad, and only being hurt in response, that you wouldn’t be, that you could be anything but terrified to do that in a genuine, real way with a man.”
 
And so I clam up, and that look comes across my face, the one from the record store twenty-five years ago, when my dashing, romantic father finally came home, and all it did was make me panic. I think I knew then what I am finally seeing now—that my father was never made to be a father.
 
My mom’s youngest brother, my uncle Tom, is one the greatest men I know. He is also, along with my uncle Vic, the great male role model in my life. But being that Tom is a responsible, mortgage-paying, conservative-voting business owner, and Vic is a gay man with a penchant for suicidal depression, Tom assumes the father role a bit more naturally. Has he been perfect? No. Did he play a typical father role? Hardly. But when I was hitting my alcoholic bottom in L.A., and I had no money, and I was falling apart, it was my uncle Tom who asked me to come home to Dallas, to live in his house, and to get clean. And during that year, my uncle took care of me. He loved me. And when he calls me on the phone, he always refers to me as “Puppy” or “Little Moose” or some other endearing nickname that makes me want to call him Dad. And that is what my father has lost in me. Because someone else rose to the challenge and took his place.
 
Lidia tells me about the great jaguar of the jungle, a spirit named Otorongo. And I can picture him immediately. In my studio at home, I have a large watercolor painting of a cheetah. She is the first thing I see every morning, and so when Lidia tells me that “the Peruvians believe that if asked, Otorongo can hunt for those truths, for those fears, deep in your heart, and catch them like any prey and bring them to your door,” I understand because my cheetah greets me each day with that same sense of honesty. And I can feel that amazing beast circling around my legs, ready to lead me deeper into this forest of who I am, who I was, and who I wish to be. Lidia has me lie down on the floor and search for why I can’t speak the truths that ring so loudly in my head. Why I get caught in that head and can’t get out when I need to the most. It takes a few minutes of her shaking her magic rattles and helping me to get the energy moving, when it hits me, “If I tell the truth, he will leave.” And that is the big fear. Whether it’s my dad, or some other man I love, I fear telling the truth because the truth is heavy and big and means something, and by saying it I might weed them out of my life. And because I often decide I want someone before I figure out whether I should want them, I prefer to hold back on the truth rather than risk losing them by it. And instead, I lose them because of it.
 
26
 
Date Twenty-Six: My Momma’s Still My Biggest Fan
 
I once asked my former sponsor Louise how I can be in a healthy relationship when I’ve never seen one up close. She reminded me that I have my mom and her boyfriend Raymond as an example, and she is right. My mom was single my whole life. She never dated. There were never any strange men coming in and out of the house. She had her work to which she was a slave, and she had me. Nana, on the other hand, retired from men at the age of fifty. Of course, by that point, she had been married four times. The last of which was a sham marriage in the late seventies to my uncle Vic’s boyfriend. They exchanged vows, rings, and she took his last name, but it was only so he could get a tax break, and she could fly for free on Delta because he was a pilot with the airline. He later died of AIDS in the eighties, but my grandmother still has his surname. I find it incredibly funny that it will be his name that goes on her tombstone—a con even in the afterlife. But my mother is a different story.
 
When my father was arrested and sent away, my mom didn’t go on a drinking binge, she didn’t have a nervous breakdown, she didn’t throw dramatic tantrums, as I know I would have done. She got a job, she went back to school, and she started working at the company where she still works twenty-five years later. And dating, well, there was no room for that. So I got used to it being just my mom and me, with my grandmother as the third member of the triumvirate. When I was in college, my mom was transferred to her company’s New York office just so she could be closer to me while I went to school. We left Nana behind, and the two of us learned to love New York City together. My mom went back for her bachelor’s degree at NYU when I was in college myself. And though I might be the more philosophical, my mom was the one to graduate with honors. Because she does things the right way.
 
And then in 2002, I decided to leave New York. I think sometimes people can’t be open to love until it doesn’t look like there are any other options left. Until there is space in the heart, and time in the schedule, to make room for another.
 
With school out of the way, her job not taking up all of her time anymore, and her daughter and only friend preparing to move to the other side of the country, my mother, on my uncle Vic’s urging, asked out the guy in her building’s gym she had been eyeing for quite some time. And that guy was Raymond. Raymond is my mom’s first boyfriend. They make dinner together and go to the movies. They go on vacations and play golf every time the weather’s good. They are in love, and they are one another’s best friends. And though I could throw out the codependency word, I also realize that sometimes a little codependence is the glue that keeps things together.
 
“So I was thinking you should come out for Presidents’ Day weekend,” I tell my mom as I sit in my car at the stables. I stare out my windshield at the jump arena, watching as horses and their riders go over a series of fences.
 
“Presidents’ Day? That sounds like a good idea.”
 
“Really?” I ask, a little surprised by her quick acceptance of the plan. My mom doesn’t visit me as much as I would like.
 
“Sure. I think I can do that.”
 
I start counting down the days for her arrival. Because my mom has seen how much I have changed. She has seen me become more able to pay the bills and show up for my family and be a woman, even though she has not had the chance to see how I live. I pick her up in my clean car at LAX with a dozen roses and decent clothes and trimmed fingernails and clipped-back hair. I pick her up, and we begin a regular weekend in Kristen’s life. I show her the work that my nonprofit does. I make her dinner. I take her to one of my meetings.
 
The next day, we start one of the best dates of my life. We go to the Observatory, and my mom loves the Sparkling Ribbon of Time. And she looks at all the brooches and pendants and points out the ones she likes. And she joins me in being at once awed and humbled by the size of this world. We go outside and stand by the café, looking at the big, beautiful view. I tell my mom how I’ve recently been thinking again about Jimmy Voltage.
 
“I just wish he would stop coming to my Tuesday night meeting,” I tell her.
 
“I don’t know why you don’t talk to him about it,” she suggests. “Ask him what happened.”
 
I look down into the drop of the landscape below; the dry harsh ground of Griffith Park surrounds us. Right in the middle of the valley, there sits a small desolate hill, as though rising up against the paved road and wealthy homes and the stark Observatory that hovers over it. It is green and beautiful and I am sure the envy of every developer tearing up the land around it. But that’s the thing about L.A.; there are some parts about us that no one can change. And maybe the same goes for Jimmy.
 
“I wouldn’t know what I’d say.” I shrug in response to my mom’s question. “I don’t think we’re that comfortable with each other to have that talk. Besides, I already know what he wouldn’t be able to say.”
 
“And what’s that?”
 
“That he thought he was dating a woman and ended up getting a scared little girl.”
 
But I’m not sure if it’s that simple, that I somehow fucked it up. I know Jimmy has his own issues too. RAD was around long before I was.
 
My mom squeezes my hand. “Don’t worry, K. It’ll happen.”
 
We go to the stables, and my mom watches me ride Arrow. Afterward, we hang out with this horse who means so much to me and as he nuzzles into my arm, my mom laughs. “I don’t know why you’re bothering with all these dates. You two look pretty in love.”
 
And we are. As I show my mom my life, I get a birds-eye view of it myself. Of the hiking trails and the road trips and the healthy meals and horses and sunny days and fresh flowers that fill my world. That night we lie in my bed and talk about what my mom was like before she had me.
 
“It’s funny because I can’t even remember really being a person then,” she tells me. “I was just so shy and confused.”
 
“Like a ghost person?”
 
“What’s that?”
 
“Oh, you know, they’re the type of personality that never quite touches down to the ground. Like Keanu Reeves or George Bush. They’re here in the physical, but you can’t really feel that they’re truly part of this world.”
 
My mom thinks about it; she is playing with my hand. “Yeah, in a way, I was.”
 
Just as my mother gave me life, so I brought her the gift in turn. Because my mom is a whole, true person today. She is funny and kind and not afraid to share her opinion. Like most parents, she lived in a certain state of denial when I was drinking and using, and I know, though I am healthy now, she wishes desperately that I had never been sick in the first place. And therein lies the great difference between my mom and me. Because I don’t regret my dark places. I feel so fortunate to have seen the sad and the sick parts of life and to have emerged from them.
 
But even more than that, she doesn’t want that kind of pain for me. Ever since I was a kid in elementary school, my mom and Nana have done everything they could to protect me from the harsh realities of life. They worked overtime to make sure I was never left alone in stores, never walked home from school by myself, was never put in a position where I could wind up on the side of a milk carton. While other kids went out and participated in a myriad of adventures, they said no to summer camp, to Indian Princesses, to sleepovers, and as I moved into adolescence, to any number of opportunities for me to get wild, get in trouble, get hurt. I have diary upon diary filled with the entries, “They won’t let me…” And it ranges from getting sugar-filled cereal, to going to all-ages nightclubs, to being able to wear Daisy Duke shorts, and finally, when I hit fifteen and found myself a boyfriend, to having sex. And it’s probably no surprise to anyone but them that I would grow up to become a woman hell-bent on adventure and sexual freedom.
BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
11.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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